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Watch my interview with pianist Jonathan Phillips about his Chopin CD

The Philosopher Pianist

Every note is an intoned contemplation of sound and its meaning - overtone, harmonics, spatial intention. Each phrase, no matter how short the narrative journey, is given expressive clarity, denouement, and completion. The pianist's deliberate pace allows the listener ample intellectual room for introspection and fresh discovery.

Each of the Bach keyboard performances on pianist Jonathan Phillips' Tranquillity album are enchantments. The artist has subsumed with intuition and patience, the far-reaching cosmos that was Johann Sebastian Bach’s creative playground.

Superb pianism utterly without ostentation, together with a delicacy of touch and temperament emanating from within his own contemplative world view, offers listeners comfortable access to a unique sensibility that levitates the mind. As performed by Jonathan Phillips, the works on Tranquillity are individual gems. But as a carefully curated musical arc, they are far more rewarding.

A graduate of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK, where he studied with Sulamita Aronovsky, Jonathan Phillips engaged in postgraduate mentoring with Alexander Kelly in London, and later under the baton of Tamás Vásáry, who recommended he take part in the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Since then, Jonathan Phillips has broadcast for the BBC, Russian, Italian, and Swedish TV and radio, and given recitals all over the UK, Europe, and the former Soviet Union. The artist maintains a piano studio in the Cotswolds region of England.

Perhaps it’s the natural beauty and frozen-in-time Medieval villages scattered about the rolling hills of the Cotswolds, or the powerful energy of the area’s Celtic history that makes the landscape so magical. Oxford, the River Severn, and three national nature reserves have contributed mightily I suspect, to the deeply meditative aura of this recording.

The peace and quiet of his rural setting has allowed Phillips opportunity to re-explore these works and other familiar repertoire, music he has known throughout his musical career. For thoughtful listeners to Tranquillity's overall structure, it's progress from one piece to the next, the beautifully performed portfolio of 21 jewels from Johann Sebastian Bach’s enormous keyboard output become a unified cathedral of sound.

When given breathing room and fresh colors (the modern piano) Bach's music reveals subtle sonic delights. Purists might take momentary pause. The selections have been garnered; single movements from larger works, some (gasp!) are transcriptions by other composers. Jonathan Phillips has thought a great deal about balance and structure, and the revelations he wishes to share are as worthy as his editing.

In his program notes, Phillips quotes Emmanuel Kant with a cheeky word volley in defense of his choices for the Tranquillity album. “I made this work principally for myself, so it agrees exceedingly well with my constitution. If any man has a mind to take part with me, he is very welcome to do so." My takeaway quote after listening to Tranquillity is from Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini. “Neorealism does not stop at the surface but seeks the most subtle aspects of the soul."

Jonathan Phillips’ recording process for Tranquillity has been neorealist. As a result, he has been able to free his subconscious mind of conscious worries, to explore beneath the surface of Bach's music. The program was played through and recorded once. No splicing, no repeated takes. Done.

Presumably after a tea break, the entire program was played through and recorded once more. Editing was about making choices between the two stream-of-consciousness versions. Phillips has been able to eliminate mind clutter and distractive worry by going with the flow. The result is an epiphanic musical arc with 21 connective tissues.

Rossellini had it right about not allowing ripples on the surface to distract from the wonders below. By simply playing each piece completely through without the baggage of conscious worry over mechanics, Phillips “seeks the most subtle aspects of the soul” through felt response, and the absence of rules of engagement.

Addressing critically each of these tracks would have been a silly and boring waste of time. Instead, I offer an overview of Tranquillity as gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art. Individually, each selection on the Tranquillity album is a moonstone of clairvoyance and spirituality in Phillips' interpretations. As a whole, the set transports the listener beyond consciousness.

Jonathan Phillips’ cleanly articulated, well balanced, and perfectly voiced performances confirm beyond doubt he is a pianist’s pianist. Technique is a given at this level, but Phillips takes full advantage of the modern piano’s capacity for delicacy and nuanced color.

The keyboard pieces he has selected are risky, because so well known. It is Phillips’ intimacy of messaging that elevates this album. Breaching sensitively the still pond of the composer’s already private soundscape with wonderful hesitations, lovely and relaxed executions, and discreetly meditative embellishments, Phillips transports the listener to sound imagery intractable by ordinary soul compass.

Revelatory performances on this album include Ich ruf du zir, Herr Jesu Christ (I call to you, Lord Jesus Christ), BWV 639 (track 2) - each individual note and every superb chord are somehow momentous in Phillips' interpretation. The pianist utilizes the modern piano beautifully, with subtle dynamic shadings, wonderful interpretive hesitations, and cadential rubati that add meaning to each fraction of melodic narrative.

Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor, BWV 849 (tracks 6 and 7) - Phillips’ magnificent understanding of sostenuto makes each note weighty with meaning. Yet there is also a finesse to this controlled energy that sets Phillips’ performance apart. Clarity, concentrated power, and control of the instrument pay off, abetted by utterly satisfying forward movement.

Organ Sonata No. 4 in E minor, BWV 528 - Adagio (track 12) - so simple, its essence stroked delicately by Phillips’ subtle comprehension of where and how the melodic line is being developed and varied by the composer. Phillips makes the piano soar with expression; his voicing is glorious. The pianist's intuitive understanding of Bach’s harmonic movement gives the listener opportunity to enjoy fresh interpretive surprises, all nuanced in style and elegance.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Australian/American composer Douglas Knehans has enjoyed worldwide recognition for his imaginative, often whimsical, occasionally apocryphal but never superfluous sound visions and compositional style; music that is at once demanding yet easily understood, charming but not a little haunted. A post-primordial prescience informs the composer’s worldview that when conflated with his kaleidoscopic command of color, grips the imagination and transforms consciousness.

Such is the stunning takeaway from Unfinished Earth a 2018 premiere recording of two substantial and also substantially diverse Knehans works on this beautifully engineered Ablaze Records disc. Tempest For Flute and Orchestra (2014) performed by the extraordinary Principal Flute of the London Symphony Orchestra Gareth Davies and Unfinished Earth for Orchestra (2016) a three-movement journey to the center of Knehans’ molten muse, offer fascinating takes on the Greeks’ five elements - earth, water, air (winds), fire and aether (the void).

The Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Douglas Knehans is also the director of Ablaze Records, founded with the intention of representing todays living composers across a range of media. Unfinished Earth has already garnered five international recording awards for good reason; the sound quality is crystal clear, particularly important considering the sometimes dense orchestrations, fascinating layers of sound color, moody narrative subtexts and virtuoso riffs for not just flute but other instruments in the orchestra - Knehans’ compositional calling card. The performances are executed with uniform virtuosity by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and managed throughout with style and finesse by conductor Mikel Toms.

An important new work for a raft of reasons, Knehans’ Tempest - Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2014) should be on every professional flutist’s must-learn list. It will disappoint neither the artistic priorities of soloist and orchestra, nor at the box office. In three beautifully constructed movements that describe Ostro, a southerly, Mediterranean/Adriatic wind; Mistral Funérailles, the cold, strong northwesterly winds that roar down the Rhone Valley and into the northern Mediterranean and Etesian, the annual summer winds that blow over Greece and the Aegean, Tempest is as fresh and breezy as the currents swirling above the planet it describes; a bright and fascinating new concerto for flute and orchestra that speaks with narrative clarity and an adventurers sense of virtuosity and excitement. Not since John Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy has a flute concerto been so chock-a-block with narrative action and disciplined mischief for both soloist and orchestra; a delight at several levels of pleasure. Kudos to flutist Gareth Davies for a thoughtfully definitive, technically virtuoso world premiere recording of this powerful new addition to the flute concerto repertoire.

Unfinished Earth is an orchestral Earth Abides, focusing energy and color on the catastrophic forces that have shaped the universe, our planet and the collective psyche of its sentient inhabitants since before knowledge. Tempering, Eternal Ocean and Tearing Drift, the three movements of Unfinished Earth afford Knehans a spacious compositional canvas for his dystopian vision of a planet in peril. The first movement Tempering, describes the roiling lava that forms from the void and becomes land, water, air - sustainers of life. The second movement Eternal Ocean “evokes the shifting currents of the deep ocean,” in the composer’s words, but is also a metaphor for the churning subconscious. Tearing Drift, it’s metallic colors and percussive chord clusters imagining seismic disaster, is a swirling maelstrom of chaos and grief, “the Munchian silent scream of isolated man,” according to the composer. The result for listeners is edgy, apocryphal, exciting and satisfying.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Buy Pok-Ta-Pok (CD #3 in the series)

Buy Mayan Time Mayan Tales (CD #2 in the series)

Buy Selections from The Mayan Cycle (CD #1 in the series)

Visit the Mayan Cycle page

American composer and author (The Mayan Cycle, The Interstellar Diocese) Jeremy Haladyna recently retired as professor of composition and Artistic Director/Conductor of the University of California Santa Barbara’s Ensemble for Contemporary Music (ECM), a post he held from 2003 to 2019, succeeding his venerable mentor, William Craft.

During that busy time, teaching while also presenting cutting edge ECM performances of avant-garde contemporary repertoire by colleagues from around the world, Haladyna quietly nurtured his own project, The Mayan Cycle, a monumentally imagined constellation of works using his own original musical ideas, tuning systems and compositional structures, to illuminate as best he could from his perspective in modern times, this long vanished but highly advanced Mesoamerican civilization that originated in the Yucatán around 1500 BCE and reached its intellectual, cultural, and military peak around 700 or 800 CE in present-day southern Mexico, Guatemala, northern Belize and western Honduras.

By 900 CE, while Europeans were wresting themselves from the Dark Ages, the Maya, one of the most advanced civilizations in the history of the planet - hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ahead of what we euphemistically call western culture - imploded, not through military conquest by rivals, but climate change. A lesson for us all.

Masters of the universe, literally, the Maya invented the idea of zero, without which mathematical calculations are impossible. Mayan priest astronomers charted the passage of planets and galaxies circling above them in the night sky with pinpoint accuracy. The Maya invented the 365-day yearly calendar, and carved in stone the passing of time, thousands of years before and after them. They were scientists before the word existed.

Beginning in 1519, the complete destruction of all but a handful of Mayan artifacts was assured by the Spanish Conquest of south and central America. Unique among ancient cultures, particularly in this part of the world, the Maya enjoyed a written language, with archives of documents. All but a few scattered fragments of Mayan written texts were destroyed by the priests of the Spanish King and Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Were it not for the jungles, which mercifully swallowed and thus preserved what was left of the physical record of Mayan culture including a 26,000 year-plus calendar stela in what is now Belize, together with other messages, legends and solar observations carved in stone, modern man would know nothing of this sophisticated civilization.

History is both a fascinating and necessary backstory for composer Jeremy Haladyna’s Mayan journey. Immersing himself in Pre-Columbian culture and thought for over 38 years, while also visiting Mayan archeological sites on ten occasions (so far), Haladyna’s quest to gain more than intellectual satisfaction from the majesty of this extraordinary people has been epic. The Maya, whose systems and symbolism obsessed on mathematical equations, cycles and seasons, represented a stunning challenge to the composer. Taking on The Mayan Project, which will no doubt be his magnum opus as a composer, Haladyna has faced a paucity of ephemera - partial stories on stone fragments lost to time until recent decades. No hint left of sound, or pulse, or inflection.

Using musical intellect and vivid imagination, Haladyna has devised his own series of tuning systems (an attempt to break at least partially with modern sound temperament) and has created live and memory fragments, electronic sounds and recorded realities, to make convincing soundscapes of Mayan origin stories, legends, and folk tales. He has composed 38 original works so far (2021) for this enormous and mind-bending project, releasing three CDs of some of that compositional output, including his most recent 2021 Centaur release, Pok-ta-Pok: Sky Games from the Mayan Cycle, a compilation of performances recorded by UC Santa Barbara faculty and guest artists between 1994 and 2008.

Tracks with titles like Monster Owls, Stingray Spine Cadenza, The Vision Serpent, and 8000 Gods Half Diminished, allow the listener to take the composer’s own advice; lay out on the grass of an evening, face the universe above that so fascinated the Maya, and daydream as Pok-ta-Pok the first track on the CD, takes hold of the imagination. In this version of the piece from 2000 for rival piano/clavichord “teams” and live percussion, the message is in the sounds - literally the title of the piece - of a popular stadium game involving competing teams, giant rings, and rubber balls. Never mind what happened to the losers.

8000 Gods Half Diminished (Tikal Stela 31) composed in 2018, tells the tale of King Stormy Sky (more on that fable some other lifetime) and is a wondrous cacophony of earthbound sounds including human and aviary atmospherics, scrapings, tapping, blowing and watery sound mysteries recorded during Haladyna’s several trips, paired nicely with electronic sound manifestations that remind the listener of present day magic realism in Latin American cinema and literature. Every note original to Haladyna, the piece is a prayer to some atavistic human memory. Fascinating. So too, Stingray Spine Cadenza for harpsichord (1999), inspired by a magnificently detailed carved lintel stone image of a stingray skeleton discovered at the jungle site of Yaxchilán.

The Vision Serpent for Piano (1999) concerns one of the central figures of Mayan ritual art. Rightly obsessed with mathematics, considered the key to all structures earthbound and terrestrial, Mayan mythology describes serpents as being the vehicles by which celestial bodies, such as the sun and stars cross the heavens. The shedding of their skin made snakes even more potent as symbols of birth and renewal for the Maya. Haladyna describes, in quite accessible pianistic manner for western ears, the various characteristics - slithery, mesmeric, messianic - of serpents.

The last track on the Pok-ta-Pok CD, Maya Zodiac, is also the longest at just under 15 minutes, and caps Haladyna’s compositional effort to fathom musically, the Mayan “timeclock” stela, which clearly ended in 2012 causing much apocalyptic angst and wringing of hands among westerners. Because they were fixated on mathematics, the Maya figured out hundreds of years before Copernicus, the rotation of our constellations was one degree every 72 years. This procession of equinoxes, the mathematical structure of all Maya thinking, has been described by the composer as the key that unlocked his musical path as a contemporary composer, into the uncharted ether of Mayan cosmology.

The Mayan zodiac contains 13 signs compared to our 12. All are animals, anchoring the Maya firmly in their natural environment. Moreover, the mathematical substructures of the Mayan Zodiac include an understanding, many hundreds of years before westerners had a clue, that earth's rotational axis takes approximately 26,000 years to make one complete revolution. Through each 26,000-year cycle, the direction in the sky to which the Earth's axis points moves in a big circle. The Mayan calendar stela does not represent a beginning and ending of history, as westerners have imagined. Rather, the stela represents just one of an eternity of cyclical progressions of 26,000 years.

If your head feels like exploding, you’re in good company. Coming to grips in recent decades with what Mayan astronomers knew about the universe, re-configures the intellectual history of humans. The Maya figured out the mathematically correct movements of objects in the universe by discovering the idea and abstract usefulness of zero, centuries before Europeans.

Quoth the Jade Mask for Cello and Piano (1986), with cellist Virginia Kron; two movements from the 2017 Organ Sonata (Maximón); En la Estera del Chilam Balam for amplified solo flute (1992), featuring UCSB faculty artist Jill Felber, and Monster Owls (2003) with narration by the composer, round out, excuse the mathematical expression, this intriguing and incredibly complex but worth the hallucinatory experience, compositional Pico de Orizaba; a meditation-driven, structure-focused, and whimsically imaginative conjuring of a time and place forgotten to history until recently. A stunning creative achievement.

Daniel Kepl: Performing Arts Review

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Visit the Benjamin Zander Center

With malice toward none and clarity for all conductor and popular TED Talk speaker on the soul-strengthening power of classical music, Benjamin Zander has resolved nearly two hundred years of misunderstanding about the tempo markings of what is without question the greatest celebration of hope for humanity ever penned, Beethoven’s choral Symphony No. 9 “Ode To Joy.” He, with input from Beethoven scholar Stewart Young, has produced concrete answers to questions about Beethoven’s tempi where hearsay and superstition have previously held sway.

London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra Chorus, Stefan Bevier Chorus Master and world class soloists soprano Rebecca Evans, mezzo-soprano Patricia Bardon, tenor Robert Murray and bass-baritone Derek Welton have released a breathtaking new recording under Benjamin Zander’s inspired intellectual guidance, after 40 years experience of conducting the work, that needs to be studied carefully by every conductor, musician and singer in the world, professional and amateur alike who loves this masterpiece. The reward for listeners and performers is discovering what Beethoven really intended.

Two CDs of this beautifully designed three CD package are devoted to Zander’s fascinating narrative of discovery. Rather than diss the current mistaken performance traditions - the famous march in the last movement for example is heard here for the first time at Beethoven’s hair-raisingly fast intended tempo - Zander celebrates the beauty of these interpretations, while also encouraging musicians and listeners to consider open-mindedly that several of the tempos we’ve become accustomed to are simply wrong.

Conductor Benjamin Zander and his Philharmonia Orchestra colleagues, singers and soloists have shaken off a late romantic Brucknerian patina that has weighted performances of the Ninth Symphony for over a century. The result is a lighter, faster, far more energized and text-pertinent interpretation that honors Beethoven’s instructions and corrects what in some cases was simple human notational error. This Beethoven 9 put simply, is historic and will change forever, our understanding of Schiller’s words, “Your magic binds together what habit and fashion has torn apart.”

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit Bruce Babcock’s website

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Visit my review page for Bruce Babcock’s Time and Again for Piano

Visit my review page for Bruce Babcock’s Alternative Facts

The narrative of Los Angeles-based American composer Bruce Babcock’s engaging new Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano “Nevertheless” is not so much its enigmatic, even passive aggressive title and real time story, as the tightrope of barely contained energy and powerful narrative colors that reap substance and satisfaction from the composer’s focused, descriptive writing.

Gusts of frisson and unease, masterfully organized meter patterns that stealthily trick the listener’s sensibility like an incident of vertigo, passages of tenuous but beautiful calm circled continuously by sub-basement leitmotifs of angst, and an emphatic if infrequent repetitive rumbling in the low register of the piano throughout the three-movement arc of the work that eloquently expresses both menace and frustration.

“In spite of that,” Babcock’s intriguing and beautifully constructed meditation on American misogyny composed in 2022 is if not a salve, at least a compassionate mirror upon our distinctly American troubles psychological and historical, over the course of the Republic’s fragile and still barely pubescent history. The piece is dedicated to women who have shown great perseverance, and carried on despite a global pandemic, a violent political insurrection, a war in Ukraine, and attacks on women’s healthcare and voting rights.

A particularly noxious incident on the floor of the US Senate in 2017 between Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell triggered the composer’s inspiration for Nevertheless. The event is described succinctly in Babcock’s erudite program note for the piece. As a result of that encounter, the composer decided to examine through the prism of his distinctly personal sonic magical realism, the perseverance in that moment and countless others throughout American history demonstrated by women in their struggle to overcome literally man-made obstacles to equitable treatment under the law.

Babcock’s acute intellectual radar about important here and now historical anecdote has, with this new and impressive work, staked out the signage and sinew of our current, past, and future equal rights struggle in a three-movement sonic time capsule.

Composed specifically for Trio Casals – violinist Alexander Kislitsyn, cellist Ovidiu Marinescu, and pianist Anna Kislitsyna – and performed by the ensemble with incredible finesse, perfection of pitch, balance, style, and virtuosity on their 2023 Navona Records release, A Grand Journey: Works for Piano, Violin, and Cello Volume 2, Babcock has added a significant new masterpiece to the piano trio repertoire which deserves close attention and public exposure for its intelligent, well structured, and audience-informative gravity and integrity.

The first movement Allegro implies unease in its consistently stuttered meter, insistent rhythmic tension, and worried if not altogether dark tonality. Like walking on a frozen pond threatening fracture, there are moments glimpsed by the listener beneath the ice of sublime if passing beauty. An example of Babcock’s solid compositional savvy, the structure of this catalytic key to Nevertheless is comprehensively shaped, the soundscape tense but accessible to modern listeners without compromising emotional impact.

A low rustle in piano opens the second movement Moderato like scudding leaves at season’s change. Joined by cello as the piano tonality and temperament ascend, the two voices meet up with violin and the three co-mingle in a beautifully romantic if bittersweet ensemble of fragile intimacy that unwinds the listener a little from the unease of the first movement. Tempered by a palpable if short-lived hopefulness, it’s not long before a returning rumble in low keyboard and a brilliant if edgy staccato section for the three instruments, reminds the listener of antipathy’s inconstancy. The last few bars, serving as a raft of musical respite, is also the heart of Nevertheless. Well crafted, mature, and profoundly moving.

The last movement Presto begins with piano cascades, fiddle and cello adding pointillist bite to the mix as the three begin a wild, highly rhythmic, and sometimes perilous musical journey reminiscent of a ride through Sleepy Hollow. The movement is a froth of swirling nervous chase energy, skittering hither and yon. The three voices engage in fascinating musical thrusts and parries, weaving complicated hide-and-seek tracers of compositional and performance excitement, enhanced by the beautiful sound engineering on this recording.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Learn more about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge

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Watch my chat with Jonathan Phillips about his Bach album, Tranquillity

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Visit composer Bruce Babcock’s website

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Visit pianist Gloria Cheng’s website

Visit my review of Bruce Babcock’s Time and Again for Piano

Buy pianist Gloria Cheng’s CD, Through Glass

Buy organist James Walker’s CD, Sustain, Vol 3

Alternative Facts for Organ has received the 2023 Global Music Awards Silver Medal: protest music

Tapping into the dystopian nightmare of present day American political dysfunction with the musical precision and analytical skills of Sigmund Freud, Emmy Award winner and Los Angeles-based American composer Bruce Babcock illustrates with two vastly exciting and entirely different approaches to the same work, that his Alternative Facts (2019) is chameleon-like; the message remains the same, but the presentation is shaped by the medium and it’s soundscape.

American pianist Gloria Cheng, who won a Grammy for her 2008 CD, Piano Music of Esa-Pekka Salonen, Steven Stucky, and Witold Lutosławski, has recorded a timely and brilliant performance of Alternative Facts on the Navona album, Through Glass, which also includes contemporary works for piano by Ovidiu Marinescu, L’lana Cotton, Alla Cohen, Curt Cacioppo, and L. Peter Deutsch.

Unremittingly edgy, Cheng’s interpretation captures the bipolar ups and downs of the Alternative Facts narrative through masterful use of virtuoso technique, clarity of balance, and torturous adherence to Babcock’s intentional rhythmic/metric seizures. Universal angst since Trump’s surprising ascension to the American presidency in 2016 has frayed the planet. Cheng’s steely pointillism, like walking on broken glass, captures the nerve-shredding yin and yang of a democracy on the edge.

Alternative Facts in its original piano version pitches hysteria and nervous agitation at a higher, brighter level of unease, something just shy of a shriek. Cheng employs her tremendous command of the piano to shape each incident with her own razor-sharp intellect.

Alternative Facts when performed on organ - the same notes with some shapeshifting in voicing - moves, out of technical necessity, at a slower and usually darker level of fractured consciousness. Composer Babcock suggested performing the piece on organ to James Walker, who recorded it for the Navona album, Sustain Vol. 3, which also features contemporary solo works for piano and organ by Jacob E. Goodman, John A. Carollo, Hayg Boyadjian, and Sydney Hodkinson.

Given free rein by the composer, Walker has constructed a sound and color scheme for the organ replication of Alternative Facts that is even more menacing than the original piano version, perhaps because the organ is such a cavernous instrument. Walker has found the deep gut of apprehension and disbelief that is the heartache and neuralgia of Babcock’s award-winning glimpse into nascent fascism.

The aural equivalent of the disturbing stream of consciousness paintings by Hiëronymus Bosch (1450-1516) which depict the infernal regions of the human psyche, composer Bruce Babcock doesn’t want hearty handclasps for Alternative Facts. Rather, sober consideration of current and future threats to American democracy.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Listen to The First Tears

Contemporary Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds conjures whole epochs in sound; vivid aural constructs that traverse the bounds of atavistic memory in search of deeper meaning and consonance in the present moment. His choral music is subliminal, invoking with resonant beauty the composer’s homeland, it’s legends and temperament. Empathic sonorities and texts of stunning clarity - often exotic, sometimes wholly ethereal - anoint the listener in an enthrallment of complicated but glorious vocal sound. The result is magical, the messaging transcendent.

Portland State Chamber Choir under the direction of Ethan Sperry has released a superb disc of Ešenvalds’ music The Doors of Heaven (NAXOS DDD 8.579008) that embraces, both as impressive sound engineering feat and consummate musical affirmation, the narrative mystery and stunning beauty of the composer’s consciousness. Two works focused on the natural world, The First Tears (2015) and Rivers of Light (2014) are conjoined with pieces using ecclesiastic texts, A Drop in the Ocean and the four-part Passion and Resurrection, both composed in 2006. A full circle is achieved artistically and philosophically on this CD; animism and faith become equal partners in humankind’s struggle to understand the universe.

The Doors of Heaven opens with The First Tears, an exquisite blend of voices and ancient sounds - jaw harp, percussion, Native American flute, and overtone singing – rationed with subtle but powerful effect to conjure a sense of primordial past and dark consequence in the telling of an Inuit origin tale that likely pre-dates Christianity’s Jonah and The Whale parable. Conductor Sperry, sound engineer John Atkinson (who edits Stereophile), and producer/editor Erick Lichte, artistic director of Chor Leoni in Canada, have found the perfect acoustic requisite for outstanding a cappella choral sound at Portland’s Saint Stephen’s Catholic Church. Utilizing the main sanctuary as well as its nooks and crannies, a spatial galaxy of sound is explored by the team. Choristers are heard close in, then drift away, return, circle, then separate, tone clusters and changing vowels, rhythms, pulses, repetitions; all shimmer in the exceptional sound quality of this ideally resonant venue.

The Doors of Heaven title text is found in the second track, Rivers of Light. The most luminous work on the disc, “The doors of heaven have been opened tonight,” is one of several texts describing the Northern Lights compiled by Ešenvalds from writings by Charles Francis Hall, Fridjof Nansen, and others. Clean diction from chorus and soloists, baritone Sterling Roberts and soprano Emmalyn Fox, the ubiquitous Jaw harp emanations suggesting the agelessness of this natural phenomenon, create a match of sound to word that is intoxicating. “From horizon to horizon misty dragons swim through the sky, green curtains billow and swirl, fast-moving, sky-filling.” Indeed!

A Drop in the Ocean (Track 3) includes texts by Saint Francis of Assisi and is dedicated to the memory of Mother Teresa, including setting to music her famous pronouncement, “My work is nothing but a drop in the ocean, but if I did not put that drop, the ocean would be one drop the less.” The most complex work on the disc opens and ends in ambient sound from around the building, inside and out. Various percussion effects, lots of sustained tones, a haunting soprano solo (Rebecca Yakos), sonorities melting into fervid whispers, then chants, and finally layer upon layer of complex harmonic density, give the piece an in-the-moment presence.

Passion and Resurrection is an oratorio for choir, soprano solo (Hannah Consenz), vocal quartet, descant sopranos, and string orchestra (Portland State University String Ensemble). At over 30 minutes, the four-part work is a journey not only from Judas’ betrayal to “He is Risen,” but also an aural history of sorts, sampling centuries of tonality beginning with an opening section that harkens to medieval polyphony, continuing through powerful sound images that could be Moorish, or Byzantine, or even Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky). Concertmaster Jonathan DeBruyn enjoys a solo moment over drone chords in strings during one moving segment and the final words, Mariam. Rabboni (Mary. Teacher), echo and dissipate in a manner reminiscent of the last bars of Neptune, the Mystic from Holst's The Planets.

 A bracing sonic achievement by the Portland State Chamber Choir, The Doors of Heaven is a must buy for those who like cutting edge choral music that is both contemporary and accessible.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review    

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Visit Leon Gurvitch’s web site

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Composer, pianist, and conductor Leon Gurvitch can’t help himself. Freedom - artistic, intellectual, and personal - is writ large in his approach to the world. His music-making in particular mirrors his thinking; a stunning mastery of improvisation, fearless interpretations of works previously thought sacrosanct. His 2017 disc of piano music on the Centaur label, Poetic Whispers, is stunningly original. In addition to his own compositions, all metaphors in sound, five composers who have guided his artistic journey are represented. Igor Stravinsky, Joaquín Rodrigo, Erik Satie, Gabriel Fauré, and Astor Piazzolla are not so much reproduced in the flesh (their notes on paper) as in kindred spirit. Gurvitch tinkers with their music as a baker might a recipe, and the result is a Babette’s Feast of intelligent improvisatory genius.

The CD opens with its namesake, Poetic Whispers, the first of seven original compositions and free improvisations by the composer/pianist. A superb melding of classical technique and savvy understanding of the colors of contemplation - harmonic progression - Whispers is rich in interpretive styling and narrative curve despite it’s too brief four minutes. Even shorter in duration, but joyous in its celebration of another genius, Gurvitch’s Hommage à Stravinsky composed in 2015 captures, with the elan of Petrushka, the spirit of one of the twentieth century’s freest spirits. 

Another pair of Gurvitch originals follow - Autumn Song and the entirely improvisational November. Together, they evoke the change of season; waning daylight, quiet contemplation, and not a little sadness. With subdued, mesmerizing prescience, Gurvitch uses the melodica, with its free-reed organ/harmonica colors, as a melancholic solo voice over a “rustling leaves” piano ostinato in Autumn Song. Gently Jazz infused, as is all his music, there can also be heard an occasional and barely audible (except to the soul)  percussive ping, which is somehow consciousness-raising. The arc of improvisation on melodica intensifies, soars, peaks in joy, then settles for the winter. And in the same pensive spirit, Gurvitch’s thoughtful November improvisation satisfies and comforts.

Impressions after Adagio from Concierto de Aranjuez (Joaquín Rodrigo) is a florid, lilting, energized, and moodily playful dissection by the artist of the Iberian character of Rodriguez’ masterpiece. An example in spades of Gurvitch’s technical prowess at the keyboard and his on-the-spot improvisational genius, a listener can discern fragments of the Adagio, but is otherwise swept away by the atavism of it all; Gurvitch channeling the First Marquis of the Gardens of Aranjuez, a virtuoso pianist in his own right, in the freewheeling daylight of virtuosity.

Likewise, Gurvitch’s fascinating, quasi-improvisational take on Gabriel Fauré’s Pavane. Ignoring the babble of purists and tearing up the written page, Gurvitch renders impotent by comparison, most of the performances this listener has heard over the past half century or more, and liberates this war horse from its chains – a stunning and intellectually defensible re-thinking that minces tradition. Fauré for example, played the piece at something just under a galop. Gurvitch on the other hand, lingers lovingly over each cadential moment, is sprightly where generations of pianists have not thought to be, and reveals without pretense, his thorough technical and interpretive command of the score. Marvelous.

Rainy, another image-filled Gurvitch improvisation, with its opening tinkling (rain) and intermittent darker musical structures (clouds), is simply delightful. Lovely jazz riffs, gorgeous and expressive like all his playing, conjures Fred Astaire dancing in the precipitation. Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1 follows, in a realization studded with Gurvitch’s innovative rhythmic embellishments and marvelous improvisatory stylings. Another Gurvitch improvisation Reflections, is brief but harmonically dense and dynamically large.

For Astor Piazzolla’s deeply moving Oblivion, Gurvitch makes use once again of the melodica for the solo voice - a superb sonic stand in for the evocative Argentinian bandoneon - and effectively sets the mood, like tapas before the main course, for Piazzolla’s spacious tone poem Milonga del Ángel. A brief chordal exposition by the pianist sets up the main tune, which Gurvitch nourishes with the tenderness of a true devotee - an interpretation that soars head and shoulders above previous performances of the piece in this listener’s experience. Capturing the very soul of tango, Gurvitch knows intuitively, that music is to be toyed with, expanded upon, filtered through one’s own sensibility, and does so here, tinkering with meter, tempi, rhythmic stylings, and discreet embellishment.

The final track on Leon Gurvitch’s extraordinary Poetic Whispers CD is another brief but emotion-packed improvisation titled simply, Lonely. A meditation on yearning and perhaps the isolation of deep thinkers, the piece also speaks to resilience and strength – an apt musical metaphor for a man who has lived the life of a stranger in a strange land since immigrating from Belarus to Germany in 2001 shaping an extraordinary career for himself in the greater world of art. 

Daniel Kepl  | Performing Arts Review

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Watch my interview with Clipper Erickson about his groundbreaking 2 CD set My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Music of R. Nathaniel Dett.

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On the heels of his groundbreaking 2015 recording My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Music of R. Nathaniel Dett American pianist Clipper Erickson has released another 2 CD set on Navona (NV6170) Tableau Tempest & Tango with repertoire by three disparate composers - Modest Mussorgsky, David Finko and Richard Brodhead - all of whom share a collective kindred spirit and narrative souvenance with the Russian psyche and its subtexts.

A refreshing interpretative pace animates Erickson’s carefully calibrated but sublimely intuitive performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition which occupies most of one disc. True to the composer’s exact written intent on the page, Erickson also uncovers inner passageways and characterful sound cameos throughout the work’s 16 painterly episodes. Constellations of scholarly revelation and Freudian insight pepper the discourse. Hailed already as a definitive interpretation, Erickson has earned rightful kudos from critics including David Canfield at Fanfare Archive: “A superior recording, worthy to stand alongside the best of the many fine recordings of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.”

Russian expatriate David Finko and American Richard Brodhead are unexpected points of light illuminating Tableau Tempest & Tango. A credit to Clipper Erickson’s artistic sixth sense, Finko’s music - a sweeping and inventive Fantasia on a Russian Theme and three extraordinarily tight and flawlessly conceived piano sonatas including the Third Sonata composed for Erickson in 2009 - brings depth, focus, structure and human empathy to the Tableau Tempest & Tango set. Alluring for its often melancholic but intimate beauty, Finko’s music explores dark topics like Stalin’s systematic murder of the Russian intelligentsia (Sonata No. 1, Solomon Mikhoels) with stark, open-eyed malaise but enpoweriing courage. Finko is a survivor and his music strengthens the soul.

American composer Richard Brodhead has two works on the Tableau set, Sonata Notturna - Piano Sonata No. 2 composed for Erickson in 2016 and Una Carta de Buenes Aires - Tango Sonatina For Piano. Though he hasn’t the Russian blood provenance of Mussorgsky and Finko, there is nevertheless a hypnotic synergy of temperament between Brodhead and his colleagues that Erickson explores with superb technical, interpretive and intellectual relish. The longest single piece on the Tableau set Sonata Notturna is a universe of night-centered shadow and vaporous color. Erickson is at home as well in the focused meditation, pointillist articulation, spatiality and mystery that is Brodhead’s Tango Sonatina. Sound engineering throughout this diverse and fascinating 2 CD Tableau Tempest & Tango set is perfection.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Soprano Amy Pfrimmer and her collaborative partner on piano and later organ soloist on this disc Thomas Kientz offer a recital of lieder and organ works by Belgian/French composer César Franck (1822-1890) that is both satisfying and revelatory.

Souvenance is the title of this 2017 MSR Classics release and it shimmers with Pfrimmer’s exquisite narrative color palette, superb diction and text-driven phrasing, matched at every nuanced turn by Kientz’ intuitive pianism.

Assistant Professor of Voice at Tulane University in New Orleans, Pfrimmer also enjoys an active career in opera. Little wonder; her interpretation of these mostly brief and not often performed masterpieces of succinct melody and romantic temperament illuminate in subtle ways, Franck’s larger instrumental works.

The pace of these 13 delicious mélodies is always forward, but without sacrificing expressive intent or textual character. Both artists thread their individual narratives into one distinct and intimate emotional voice, at once superb and artfully contained, while also immediate and communicative to an audience.

Banality banished, Pfrimmer’s resonant and wide-ranging vocal timbre - sometimes bright, at other moments rich and dark depending on the needs of the texts - brings balanced, considerate and empathic intellectual heft to phrases like French poet Marceline Desbordes-Valmore’s “When the evening bells, in their slow flight bring down the hours at the bottom of the valley/If you have no friends or loved ones close to you, think of me!” from Les Cloches du soir (Evening Bells).

What a pleasure as well, considering Franck was one of the greatest organists of his time, to hear Thomas Kientz - titular organist at Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune Protestant Church in Strasbourg and co-titular organist of the choir organ at Strasbourg Cathedral - perform two works; a Pastorale from Six Pièces Opus 16-21 and the Fantaisie from Trois Pièces pour Grand Orgue on the superb instrument at L’abbaye de Royaumont near Paris.

Sound engineering by Jean François Cardonne at Royaumont and L’église St. Guillaume in Strasbourg where the songs were recorded, is a perfection of sonic ambiance, each space a resonant and pliant music box of hue and color captured with unblemished skill by Cardonne, an artist in his own right.

Souvenance is a repertoire gem; 13 superb examples of Franck’s wide-ranging but not often performed lieder and two excellent examples of the composer’s facility, compositionally and technically, from his large oeuvre of organ masterpieces.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Classically trained flamenco/Mediterranean/jazz composer and guitarist Chris Fossek has developed a fascinating pan-cultural aesthetic for this, his premiere CD of original compositions and improvisations. Together with Los Angeles-based colleagues Kai Kurosawa electric bass, Nate Keezer percussion, Hugo Aguayo palmas and Peter Slocombe tenor saxophone Fossek offers nine diverse and magical works that speak to his superb musicianship, quietly passionate taste and profound respect for and interest in the culture, music and manner of his mentor, Balkan guitarist Miroslav Tadic.

A confident command of color, atmosphere, harmonic movement and compositional architecture - not to mention stunning technique - inform Fossek’s unique compositional voice. Recorded and mixed with care and discipline by the artist, the studio ambiance and purity of sound is remarkable on this disc.

As the CD’s title makes clear to all who have walked the trail along the summit of the Santa Ynez mountain chain behind Santa Barbara, where the cool and refreshing climate of the coastal side mixes happily with the warmer, drier climate rising from the floor of the Santa Ynez Valley side to create a hybrid that can only be experienced in that precious space and moment, Camino Cielo is a perfect metaphor for Chris Fossek’s muse.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Listen to Satellite from Deep Sky Objects

Founded in 2002 by four composers including Artistic Director Anthony Brandt, Professor of Composition and Theory at Rice University’s acclaimed Shepherd School of Music, Musiqa Houston celebrated its fifteenth season in 2017 as the city’s leading contemporary music ensemble in style, with the release of its first CD, which also commemorates the ensemble’s first ever commission, Sebastian Currier’s 2010 Deep Sky Objects for Soprano, Chamber Ensemble and Electronics. With this recording, Musiqa Houston has effectively entered the big leagues. 

A world-class artistic achievement, boasting a high standard of technical execution and sound design by Chapman Welch with computer performer Ben Krause, Deep Sky Objects pairs a superb piano quintet of Houston’s finest - violinists Maureen Nelson and Lisa Burrell, violist James Dunham, cellist Lachezar Kostov and pianist Tali Morgulis - with Houston-based soprano Karol Bennett. Pre-recorded electronic sounds, some imaged by the composer, others courtesy of NASA refresh the soundscape.  

The result in ten short movements, is a work of transcendent otherworldly beauty that fully realizes American author and poet Sarah Manguso’s cycle of meditations on intergalactic longing and desire.

A tinkling patina of discreet electronic sounds evocative of conversational asides from R2D2 pass back and forth and around Manguso’s descriptive libretto on the subject during the first movement, Satellite. The vitality of Currier’s electronic coloration aesthetic for Clouds, the second movement, delivers gossamer, dreamlike sound imagery over a  beautifully diatonic chorale of meditation and mystery in low strings. 

Manguso’s text,  I’m tired of what I see, like an eternal sleep being invoked, stretches aural imagery to stunning and instantly identifiable effect; floating, non-aggressive wisps and layers of delicate sound - just what a cloud should be. 

More insistent piano quintet writing informs the narrative of Storm, the third movement of Deep Sky Objects. Currier’s deft use of electronic sounds to emulate percussive effects, his powerful evocation for soprano Bennett of Manguso’s text:

The fire the sky lets go of

Is my body, 

Is my voice,

Is the storm the sky turns into,

propels the action forward; pulse and ensemble unison urgency studded by disturbing electronic talismans of shattering glass - breathtaking. The fourth track, Star, is also psychically unsettling, as inert male voices intone zeros and ones in an emotionless, monotonic babble that is the stark underbelly of our electronic age. 

Currier masterfully creates a sense of great distance with his soundscape for Time, the fifth movement. Discreetly summoning waltz motifs, a wink at Kubrick’s iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey perhaps, the composer accommodates the dance of Manguso’s certainty:

My arms in space

Hold you in time—

I know they do.

Movements six and seven - Space and Light - represent at least to this listener, a temperamental sea change for Deep Sky Objects. A gorgeous lullaby of painful regret, Space is passionately human, expressed eloquently by cellist Lachezar Kostov and soprano Bennett:

My face touching your face—

I remember it.

It was so real.

I know it was.

Light is an entirely fresh soliloquy for soprano and electronics, a mellifluous recitativo, that allows soprano Bennett to spin out-of-body sensual webs of eternal longing to Manguso’s riveting simile:

A song moves across the black world forever,

Which is how I love you.

Want is the most frenetic movement of the cycle. Currier masterfully employs his electronic wizardry to color without cloy, the piano quintet’s purposeful and solid playing, the fervor sustained until Bennett has intoned her last phrase:

But longing for you,

Feeling this fire,

Is the real paradise.

after which, the entire musical construct seems to crash downward, obliviating itself. Incredible.

The penultimate movement of Deep Sky Objects is Belief. Poignant as Schubert’s lieder, with a 21st century sprinkling of electronic fairy dust and avian twitters for added beguilement, Manguso’s mantra - I can live in the world/With your love - gains strength by virtue of its sweet logic: 

The incomprehensive impossible light—

I can see it now.

Opening with the enthralling electronic emulation of cosmic winds heard earlier in the cycle, Duet is night sounds (crickets) and the comforting chords of epiphany and resolution. Despite an eternity of distance between Manguso’s lovers:

Wherever you are

I am

Whenever you are I am

Karol Bennett’s sultry-plaintive, expression-filled voice, in superb concordance with the master piano quintet assembled for this recording project - Nelson, Burrell, Dunham, Kostov, Morgulis - have known Deep Sky Objects since its inception and that performance familiarity has bred a sensitive consciousness about Sarah Manguso’s powerful libretto of love and Sebastian Currier’s passionate music of the spheres. The recording is an artistic and sound engineering coup de théatre.     

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Hatzlacha Rabbah!!! Sheet Music

The Rite of Spring on YouTube

The Rite of Spring Sheet Music

Violists of the world, rejoice! Los Angeles-based freelance violist Victor de Almeida has boosted the repertoire for the instrument recently with brilliant performances on his personally released CD of two compelling showpieces; Almeida's unique and extraordinarily inventive transcription for viola and piano of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and a definitive performance of Los Angeles-based composer George N. Gianopoulos’ irresistibly optimistic Hatzlacha Rabbah!!! (Much Success!!!). Almeida’s brilliant collaborator on the CD is Los Angeles-based pianist Harout Senekeremian.  

Not the first iteration for viola and piano of Stravinsky's enormous and complicated ballet score, Almeida's Rite of Spring is far more than a transcription, venturing beyond his predecessors in thoughtful dissection and careful re-voicing of the original scores to give his version as much orchestral color and authenticity as possible. 

Artistic license is skillfully employed by Almeida to frame and color his version of The Rite of Spring in a manner and to a level of expertise that both flatters his technical mastery of the instrument and his romantic take on the score. A profound understanding of Stravinsky’s muse (six years studying the scores) gives the arrangement and by extension its performance, both already brimming with creative independence, additional authenticity and cachet.

Folk centered yet urbane in compositional style, Gianopoulos’ Hatzlacha Rabbah!!! the other work on the CD is spirited from the get-go, a playful and joyous celebratory dance; the perfect salute to Almeida’s Stravinsky project. For its optimism alone, the piece is a wonderful programming discovery. Originally a viola duet, the composer rearranged Hatzlacha Rabbah!!! for viola and piano and dedicated the new version to Almeida – mazel tov!

The CD is no longer generally available, but both performances can be found on YouTube. Former Principal Viola of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Evan Wilson, was Almeida’s mentor and producer for the Stravinsky portion of the CD. Scott Hosfeld produced the Gianopoulos segment. Overall Sound Engineer for the project was Damon Tedesco with whom Almeida works regularly in the Hollywood film and television industry.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Hollywood-based film and television composer, arranger, songwriter, conductor, producer and powerhouse Grammy Award winner (best arrangements for Natalie Cole), five time Grammy nominee and seven time Emmy nominee Nan Schwartz has released a fascinating disc of her orchestral music on the Divine Art label (2018) that recounts her journey as a master of composition and genie of the magic carpet ride that is orchestral color, harmonic purpose and narrative landscape rooted in personal experience. This disc presents premiere recordings of four Schwartz orchestral works - Aspirations, Perspectives, Romanza and Angels Among Us.

Sharing the CD is a premiere recording by Australian composer Brenton Broadstock, his four-movement Made in Heaven: Concerto for Orchestra. Recipient of a 2014 AM - Member of the Order of Australia - for significant service to music as a composer, educator and mentor, Broadstock was Professor of Music and Head of Composition on the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne from 1982 to 2007. His orchestral and chamber music, including six symphonies, several orchestral works, four concertos, three string quartets, a chamber opera and a raft of chamber music for diverse instruments is performed regularly by the major orchestras and chamber groups of Australia and throughout the world.

Antipodes literally and figuratively - Schwartz lives in Los Angeles, Broadstock in Melbourne; hers has been a career in the hardscrapple world of Hollywood filmmaking, his rooted in academia - both nevertheless enjoy common ground in their love and respect for jazz that is deliciously palpable on this disc. A mastery of compositional lyricism and inventive orchestration seals the bond between the two composers and makes this CD so interesting.

Schwartz has been awash since childhood in encounters with legendary jazz artists who were regulars at her parents’ home in Hollywood. Her music is infused with that aesthetic. Aspirations, which opens the CD features soloists Harry Allen tenor sax and pianist Lee Musiker and speaks vividly to Schwartz’ understanding of the art of orchestration and her unerring sense of harmonic movement; purposeful, emotive and full of textured character. Perspectives features Jon Delaney on electric guitar in a mellow, convivial dialectic with pianist Musiker to sophisticated jazzy orchestral asides à la Henry Mancini. Violinist Dimitrie Leivici is the soloist for Schwartz’ Romanza, where the composer’s careful construction of emotional electricity and frisson colors the narrative beautifully.

Angels Among Us features trumpeter Mat Jodrell and is the most sophisticated of the four Schwartz works on this CD. The opening bars of the piece shimmer with suspense; Schwartz’ use of the trumpet’s low register creates an evocative and touching narrative ambiance; jazz colors abound discreetly; a solo trumpet cadenza and vibrant coda end the quasi-concerto in a splash of breathtaking chutzpah. Trumpet soloists, take note!

Brenton Broadstock’s Made in Heaven Concerto For Orchestra (2009/2013) is an abstract tribute to the iconic jazz recording Kind of Blue (1959) that featured a royal family of jazz artists including Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. The concerto’s four movements - So What?, Flamenco Sketches, Blue in Green and All Blues are cyphers, Broadstock’s compositional language opaque rather than literal. Like Schwartz, Broadstock is a master of ebb and flow, managing the vast orchestral soundscapes of Made in Heaven with magical realist results, like the sound imagery in Flamenco Sketches, the quizzical temperament of So What? and moody introversion of Blue in Green. Rhythm and pulse the heart and soul of jazz, bring Broadstock’s visionary homage full circle with the playful last movement All Blues.

Two wonderful orchestras, the Synchron Stage Orchestra Vienna (Schwartz) and the Bratislava Studio Symphony (Broadstock) perform splendidly under conductor Kevin Purcell.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Listen to the last movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132

Founded in 1991 in Philadelphia, the DaPonte String Quartet left that cosmopolitan city  for the peace, beauty and enchantment of rural Maine in 1996 after an earlier residency there resonated in the ensemble’s collective consciousness. Altruistic as the music they play, artistic life in the Pine Tree State, including over 70 concerts a year, residencies, workshops and masterclasses continues to inspire the mission of the group; to connect audiences to the great masterpieces of the string quartet repertoire by bringing to life the human context of each score’s inspiration and creation. 

Communities like Boothbay Harbor, South Bristol, Tenant’s Harbor, Harpswell and Portland to name but a handful have embraced the high standard of musical creativity, intellectual process and interpretive integrity DaPonte concerts bring to performances in grange halls, churches, community centers and historic concert halls throughout the state. 

Violinists Lydia Forbes and Ferdinand Liva, violist Kirsten Monke and cellist Myles Jordan have in turn found satisfaction in bringing insight and inspiration to a generation or two of Mainers who might otherwise never have had the opportunity to hear a professional string quartet in live performance.

The DaPonte String Quartet’s beautifully engineered and fastidiously executed 2016 CD Pathways to Healing pairs energized and stylistically homogeneous performances of two huge works; Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132 and Mendelssohn’s String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 13. The album’s three-word title expresses DaPonte’s aesthetic and also hints at important subtexts to be heard in each. 

Both composers were in personal and artistic tumult when they composed these epic narratives - one hears the sturm und drang of their circumstances clearly in the music - yet both also found solace and healing through their art. The most beautiful and reassuring melodies in the string quartet repertoire can be heard here.

Beethoven had little more than a year to live at the premiere of his Opus 132 in November 1825. Mendelssohn was 18 in 1827 when he composed his Opus 13 in honor of Beethoven’s passing that year. Twenty years later (1847) Mendelssohn himself would pass unexpectedly at the too young age of 38.

For Beethoven, the years during which he composed his last four string quartets were agonizing, his health was deteriorating precipitously, deafness exacerbating the composer’s isolation and depression. In 1827 the young wunderkind Mendelssohn had to confront his own demons when his first and only opera, the singspiel Die Hochzeit des Camacho failed, utterly. The composer was 18. 

As if on holy pilgrimage Mendelssohn, who adored Beethoven as did every other composer and musician of the period, not only placed his Quartet No. 2 in the same A Minor tonality as Beethoven’s Opus 132, but made use of a compositional technique the master frequently employed in his last works - cyclic form, in which the same thematic material occurs in more than one movement. The younger genius even explored admirably, the harmonic eccentricities and constantly shifting mood changes of Beethoven’s last quartet.

Pathways to Healing is an incomparable window of historic, musicological and performance practice insight, not only for music lovers and audiophiles in general but musicians, amateur and professional alike, working on either or both masterpieces. 

The superb acoustics of the historic Head Tide Church (1838) in Alna, Maine (population 725) have provided producer Bob Ludwig an ideal recording venue. Clean sound capture and warm balances are part and parcel of the historic building’s ambiance and contribute immeasurably to the warmth and intimacy of this recording.

A sustained, non-vibrato introduction launches the first movement Assai sostenuto; Allegro [track 1] of the Beethoven quartet, which is the first work on the disc. Rich ensemble blend confirms the musical marriage between these four DaPonte teammates has triumphed over individual temperament. Color and warmth abet the ensemble tone in precious dollops, as the first substantive melodic statement takes hold dramatically – the quartet’s color becoming rich and effusive for the remainder of the movement.

The second movement Allegro ma non tanto [track 2] features tasteful use of rubati – cadential approaches are lusciously crafted, Beethovenian eccentricities in harmonic movement are outlined lovingly by the quartet. The middle section of the movement is particularly magical, like a glass harmonica in it’s delicacy. Balances are beautifully shaped as the tune is passed around the four voices of the quartet, and an elasticity of the bar line contributes to the stylish effect.

Two half step intervals become the heart and soul of the third movement, Molto adagio; Neue Kraft fühlend: Andante [track 3]. Composed in gratitude after the composer survived a particularly awful bout of intestinal disorder that nearly killed him, the subtitle is Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart (Holy song of thanksgiving of a convalescent to the Deity). 

A quiet figure, non-vibrato as in the opening bars of the quartet, establishes an appropriately reflective mood. DaPonte’s careful dynamic terracing strengthens the opening statement; a simple swell, then back to the reflective tune that is the movement’s chorale of thanksgiving. Broadly engaging on several emotional levels and beautifully realized by the ensemble – wistful, fleeting, sweetly vulnerable and deeply moving – the movement is taxing on several levels, but the four artists maintain a powerful energy and stamina throughout. An odd ending harmonically – the tonality anything but one of resolution – leaves the listener hanging. Genius. 

A brief Alla marcia, assai vivace [Track 4] packs a wealth of dynamic contrast into a short period of time unlike any other quartet writing of the period, followed by a unique fifth movement Allegro appassionato [track 5] that after a folkish introduction, canvases the human condition in all its explosive and contrary energy. The DaPonte performance is so huge it sounds like a string orchestra on occasion. An ensemble of like minds, the quartet also knows when to lay on the vibrato and when not, which makes for a vibrant, colorful, interesting and memorable performance.

The Mendelssohn quartet, which occupies the last half hour of the Pathways CD is a tour de force. The first movement Adagio; Allegro vivace [track 6] after a reflective, almost chorale tune introduction, jumps off the page. So many notes! Extraordinary ensemble energy, a hallmark of the disc, is here resplendent, full-bodied and taught. By contrast, spaciousness is the key to the Adagio non lento [track 7] the quartet working dynamics for maximum expressivity.

The third movement Intermezzo: Allegretto con moto; Allegro di molto [track 8] charms with it’s delightful violin tune over pizzicato accompaniment, a colorful Midsummer Night’s Dream precursor. Mendelssohn composed a concert overture on the Shakespeare subject the year before (1826) which morphed eventually, into the treasured incidental music of 1842. 

The last movement Presto: Adagio non lento [track 9] is solidly realized, the quartet taking its time setting moods and declinations, willful outrages and feints - so much beautiful regret and suffering, executed brilliantly with flurries of technical bravura. The last bars of the Adagio non lento section, passive and fate-conscious, represent Mendelssohn’s amen and farewell to the master. The DaPonte Pathways to Healing CD is a gourmet pairing of superbly interconnected works performed with care and perfection.  

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Life, Inspiration & Rhythmic Movement

Bulgarian-born, New York City-based pianist Tania Stavreva’s first solo piano CD Rhythmic Movement/$15 is an eclectic toy chest of music close to the artist’s heart, performed with a natural passion, positive energy, and contagiously playful intellectual curiosity that sublimely conflates her classical virtuosity with her relaxed, fresh, infinitely improvisatory jazz prowess.

Mixing genres and styles, the artist has selected composers including Stavreva herself; Bulgarian composer  Pancho Vladigerov and his son Alexander;  Argentine Alberto Ginastera; Russian Nikolai Kapustin; and Grammy-nominated American composer Mason Bates. The result is an entertaining CD of first-rate music and extraordinary music making.

Already on Billboard’s Classical Top 10, Rhythmic Movement has also been awarded Best Classical Album at the 2017 Clouzine International Music Awards and has received three awards for outstanding achievement and was a medal recipient in the category of Classical Emerging Artist and Album at the 2017 Global Music Awards.

Composed by Stavreva for the Onomatopoeia Theater Company’s off-off Broadway contemporary adaptation of The Tempest, the CD opens with its namesake, Rhythmic Movement [1] a short composition that serves as moniker for the character Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax in Shakespeare’s play. A persistent, agitated pulse, rooted perhaps in a simple but profoundly atavistic Balkan modality familiar to the composer, describes the aberrations of this half man, half beast. Ratchenitza [2] is a traditional Bulgarian folk dance written by one of the country’s most important composers, Pancho Vladigerov. It is the sixth and final piece from his Shumen Miniatures and is bright and airy in character. Stavreva’s playing, precise and clean throughout, particularly her high register passagework, is captured to perfection by producer, engineer, and mixer Ron Saint Germain.

The artist’s excellent liner notes point out that Vladigerov uses a typically Bulgarian asymmetrical rhythm (2+2+2+3) for Mouvement Rythmique [3] the last of six from his piano album Aquarelles, Opus 37. Stavreva’s playing is flawlessly balanced between right and left hands, the inner compositional workings of the piece luscious and clear. There is plenty of color contrast in Stavreva’s playing as well, especially the moody section that in due course breaks into the bright sunlight of the piece’s denouement and finale. The piece is lots of fun in the artist’s able hands!

Alberto Ginastera’s Danzas Argentinas, Op. 2 spin vividly colorful images of people, places, and things; exactly Stavreva’s interpretive coin. Danza del Viejo Boyero (Dance of the Old Herdsman) [4] opens the set with a quirky folk dance figure played by Stavreva with keen pulse and energy. Danza de la Moza Donosa (Dance of the Beautiful Maiden)[5] is realized by the artist with tender technical and intellectual sensibility; bittersweet imagery made tangible by the pianist’s solidly intuitive playing. And the last of the set, Danza del Gaucho Matrero (Dance of The Arrogant Cowboy) [6] is deliciously frenetic, agitated, insistent, pointed in remarks with wide flourishes of bravado. Stavreva executes passages both fun and fantastical with superb musical charm and intuition.

Ruvido ed Ostinato, The fourth movement from Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 22 [7]is chock-o-block with syncopated energy, masterfully focused throughout; a virtuoso workout presented by the artist with effortless, even mischievous elan. The low register on the instrument sounds fabulous here, while balanced voicing, dynamics, and stylistic finesse are all accounted for; an ecstatically driven performance.

Two from Nikolai Kapustin’s Jazz Concert Etudes - Prelude and Toccatina are performed with bravura technical wizardry and pizzazz by the artist. My listening notes say simply, from hot to hotter! Stavreva is all over the keyboard, every note distinctly in its place for the Prelude [8] which sparkles with the jaunty viability of her interpretation. Toccatina [9]revels in texture and style, the pianist’s suave, natural technical ease becoming irresistibly expansive and embracing. These two in particular, but the entire Jazz Etudes set are valuable additions to the recital repertoire by Russia’s Gershwin.

Another composition by the artist, The Dark Side Of The Sun [10] is a fabulously evocative improvisation created inside the guts of the piano. Strums, swishes, glissandi, and other effects create a fearful dark storm of sound, with rumbling thunder, and ominous portent to open the session. Stavreva’s versatility and taste make perfect sense of the atmospheric and not a little scary wonder of the piece. Ron Saint Germain’s engineering and mixing expertise once more beautifully conjures agitation, and marvels at sound decay. Intriguing!

American composer Mason Bates has recently been named the most performed composer of his generation and the 2018 Composer of the Year by Musical America. His White Lies for Lomax [11]is a blues fantasy tribute to Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicalogist whose early recordings influenced bands like Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones. An electro-acoustic piece, Dark Side opens in the colors of delicate lace, a sustained pedal creating lovely overtones.An intensely interesting melodic figure paces the opening bars, then dives, dips, and curls into playful narrative and jaunty attitude. Lots of tinkling high figures intoxicate and entice, especially during the haunting pairing of the living artist’s improvisations and the original, distant ghost performance of Lomax’s song Dollar Maime. Evocative!

Personalizing her CD with flair and originality, Stavreva mesmerizingly sings, a cappella, the 17 second popular Bulgarian folk tune Dilmano, Dilbero [12]as prelude to her incredible performance on the piano of Alexander Vladigerov’s Dilmano, Dilbero, Variations on a Bulgarian Folk Song [13].

A tour de force, the set of nine spectacular and deeply moving variations offer every type of pianistic challenge. Color, technical difficulty, style, sequence, and musical architecture present a world of moods, some wistful, others remarkably symphonic. The artist kicks up a hornets nest of kaleidoscopic keyboard color, finessed by her inherent historical insight and informed by the artist’s detailed passagework. Tremendous audio capture as well in the Variations, a pleasure for the ears and imagination as vistas of musical imagery explore the instrument’s sonic capabilities. Character portraits of a Bulgarian archetype, Variations are tempered by a proud history of empires and oppessions. Stavreva’s interpretation is empathic in every way, by turns wistful and delicate or apocalyptic. Stavreva brings to the table a spectacular performance!

For fun, but also as an indication of her ecumenical taste and diverse interests, the final track on Tania Stavreva’s first CD is titled, with tongue-in-cheek, Ritmico y Distorsionado (Rhythmic and distorted) [14] and is the same Ginastera movement (Ruvido ed Ostinato) from track seven, this time embellished with the improvised drumming of Will Calhoun. The two purposefully distort the audio in certain sections this time around. Edgy!

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Once in a great while two artists will click cosmically, their minds and shared virtuoso capabilities morphing in sweet concordance to achieve a transformative creative result. Individual temperament finds compromise willingly in such a weld, collaborative agreements on ensemble balance, color, timbre, and tempi become intuitive between the two over time. Luminous beauty and exquisite erudition are the result. Such a pairing can be heard clearly on a new CD from Portugal’s Artway label by cellist Filipe Quaresma and pianist António Rosado. Familiar to most music lovers, French composer César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major heard on this disc in its popular arrangement for cello and piano will satisfy, most particularly for the incredible leisure with which the two artists survey this masterpiece. The other work on the CD is less familiar to most and worthy of top billing - Portuguese composer Luís de Freitas Branco’s gorgeous Sonata for Cello and Piano (1913). Magical interpretations by these two extraordinary artists distinguish this CD as one to own.

Luís de Freitas Branco (1890-1955) was an aristocrat, his family well connected for centuries with Portugal’s royal family. Highly educated, including studies in Berlin and Paris, it is the French influence that is most fragrant in his Sonata for Cello and Piano composed in 1913. The entire four-movement work is a joy to the ear from the first movement’s jazz-like solo piano opening through its several blood-stirring sturm und drang exchanges between the two protagonists. The heart and soul of the sonata is its third movement, a haunting collection of mystical soliloquys sustained like fragile dreams between the two artists in gorgeous collaboration. The moody virtuosity and dramatic imagery of the last movement brings Freitas Branco’s marvelous sonata to a thrilling close. Book it.   

César Franck’s Violin Sonata in A Major - the well-known arrangement by French cellist Jules Delsart – becomes an utterly unique experience for listeners in this velvety interpretation by Quaresma and Rosado. Pianist Rosado, whose playing is mesmerizing throughout, makes an electrifying yin to cellist Quaresma’s mellow, meditative yang. In tandem, they are a perfect match. Recording Engineer Jorge Simöes da Hora balances pianist and cellist beautifully throughout the Franck, which is not such an easy task considering the veracity and pluck the duo bring to the sonata. The last bars of the fourth movement can be treacherous but were fielded with a relentless focus on beauty and controlled panache by the duo; a thrilling performance as much for its restraint as its exuberance.

Recorded in Portugal’s Centro Cultural das Caldas da Rainha, the engineering on this beautiful CD is clean, the sound quality pure and perfectly balanced. Artway Producer Tiago Manuel da Hora has found in Quaresma and Rosado a blend of calm and impetuosity that redefines both masterpieces. Refreshing.  

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Read tenor Benjamin Brecher’s bio

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Tenor Benjamin Brecher and pianist Robert Koenig have created a sweet jewel of a CD for MSR Classics. Forgotten Liszt: Songs for Tenor and Piano is a 2016 release with fascinating pretext and unusual programming. At the suggestion of Liszt scholar Dr. Michael Vitalino who discovered a large swath of Liszt’s art songs that had fallen out of the repertoire, Brecher and Koenig set about recording 12 of them. A few, like the three Sonetti del Petrarca are not unfamiliar to singers and audiences but most, especially early first versions of songs, have been dusted off and prepared for this recording, fomenting fresh insight into Liszt’s tastes and temperament. Six songs on this disc are world premieres.
Benjamin Brecher is Professor of Voice and Area Head for the Voice Program at the University of California Santa Barbara. Well known to Opera Santa Barbara audiences, Brecher maintains a busy opera and concert schedule in the United States and beyond. A graduate of The Juilliard Opera Center, New England Conservatory of Music and Bowling Green State University, Brecher joined the UCSB music faculty in 2008. Robert Koenig is Professor of Keyboard and Chair of the Department of Music at UC Santa Barbara specializing in collaborative piano and chamber music. A graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, he enjoys an active career nationally and internationally as a soloist and collaborative pianist for many of the world’s great musicians. He has been on the faculty at UC Santa Barbara since 2007.
The first two art songs on Forgotten Liszt are world premiere recordings; first versions by the composer of Angiolin dal Biondo crin with a lovely piano intro and sweet timbre to Brecher’s mid-high voice and Die Lorelei, favored with clear diction and delicacy in voicing, clean high notes with perfect intonation on Brecher’s part, Koenig’s keyboard collaborations bringing moods and images vividly to life. A third, much later version of Die Lorelai, now using a French translation (La Loreley) is next up - the writing more complex and exposed for both voice and piano, including challenging but glorious high tessitura moments for tenor, fantastically expressive writing for piano and a dramatic last couple of bars for tenor, exquisitely realized by Brecher.
Three Petrarch Sonnets are likely the most recognizable to listeners because of their original iterations as solo piano pieces. Refreshing to hear with Petrach’s texts, Sonnets 47, 104 and 123 are beyond song in scope and imagination, more like bravura grand arias for both instruments. Brecher and Koenig make a particularly good case for the last, I’vidi in terra angelici costumi (I behold on earth the habits of angels). A delicate sound soufflé suits Petrarch’s words, “and air and wind were filled with sweetness.” The opening piano solo casts a huge spell, while Brecher’s mid/low register is given opportunity to resonate - rich and evocative. A lovely piano finish to this sonnet caps the set- moving, whispering, distant, marvelous.
Six more songs finish out the disc - four are world premiere recordings. Dr. Vitalino’s CD notes make for informative reading as he describes the histories of Elegie, Quand tu chantes bercée, Jeanne d’Arc au bucher, Wenn die letzten Sterne Bleichen, Vergiftet sind meine Lieder and Die Tote Nachtigall. Of the six, Jeanne d’Arc au bucher to text by Alexandre Dumas is the most powerful. A vivid narrative, Jeanne laments her fate to be burned at the stake, “and yet I saved France.” Brecher’s voice is full and expressive throughout this last set of songs, but particularly operatic here. A heartbreaking story, Die Tote Nachtigall, the last piece on this revelatory Liszt CD is superbly realized by both artists - magnificent.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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2023 Global Music Awards, Silver Medal: contemporary classical

American composer Bruce Babcock’s Time and Again, A Piano Sonata in Four Movements, was composed during the COVID year 2020 at the invitation of pianist Anna Kislitsyna, and is on her 2022 Navona Records release, Piano Spectrums: New Works for Piano.

In four movements - Disquietude, Tarantism, Resolve, and Poste-Haste – Babcock’s sonata traces, with steely clarity of compositional function and narrative purpose, his take on the pandemic, examining four stages of humanity’s apprehension during that surreal year.

The first movement, Disquietude, begins with a sequence of powerfully dark, fearful premonition chords in the middle/low register of the instrument, immediately setting a wary vibe for the movement’s manic narrative – a dawning emotional awareness in the music, of existential peril.

The tempo quickens by degrees, until a splintered new motive emerges with pointillist, emphatically marcato but scattered energy, the motive dancing grotesquely all over the keyboard, like a frantic animal sensing trouble but not having a means of escape.

The ominous mood escalates, with a recap of sorts of the descending chords from the beginning of the piece, dolloped here and there throughout the movement with moments of otherworldly, vaporous stasis, a hovering, gossamer twilight that appears briefly several times. Dark apprehension prevails, however, in the last bars of the movement.

The second movement, Tarantism, is wonderfully written and marvelously accessible, despite the grotesque truths of Babcock’s lesson on the meaning of the dance form, Tarantella. During the Age of Exploration (15th to 17th centuries) the great minds of the time developed an utterly baseless theory that a psychological illness causing an extreme impulse to dance, was the result of a tarantula bite. Forget moldy bread.

Bruce Babcock wrings compositional irony from this wet towel of sophistry, turning the ancient falsehood about tarantulas into a metaphor for the nervous, planet-wide hysteria over COVID causes and cures during the pandemic. The movement’s introductory material is electrically energetic and rhythmically punchy, a persuasive motivic argument that stands strong, despite a calmer, more reasoned secondary solution, offered then quickly chased out of the conversation. Tarantism takes charge of the metaphorical argument once again, and with a final flurry of notes and musical imagery suggesting a rapping of knuckles on wood, ends the debate, intestate.

Resolve, the third movement of Bruce Babcock’s Time and Again, is a pianistic delicacy, the fragile yet resiliently optimistic musical calm before a final storm. Simple yet mindful progressions, gentle colors, a whispering, languid and improvisatory temperament, promise resolution and survival, joy, and peace. A short-lived fantasy.

From its first emphatic bars, the fourth movement, Post-Haste, is a sonic malevolence, suffocating the space around its controlling octave motives with desperately manic fidgets, which in turn metastasize into ominous portents on the piano. The movement ends in a cascade of sequences that finally escalate the frenzy to nearly unbearable intensity, swallowed at last in a turbid piano slam-dunk. Stunning.

Anna Kislitsyna’s heroic interpretive intelligence, subtle technical virtuosity, and distinctive mastery of nuance and color, set her apart as particularly adept at the painstaking intellectual wood shedding necessary to thoughtfully prepare contemporary repertoire.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Gailloreto’s refreshingly original jazz suite imagines gods and heroes getting their beads read by the Oracle of Delphi 

Chicago-based composer and jazz saxophonist Jim Gailloreto hit on the idea for his latest CD during a gig at the Getty Villa in Santa Monica a few years back. The Villa is itself a replica of an ancient Roman country house. Statues of gods, emperors, statesmen and heroes haunt the place, conjuring a time of multiple deities with specific functionality.

The creative result of Gailloreto’s Getty Villa immersion is The Pythiad, a nine-movement paean to the Oracle of Delphi recorded in 2016 and released in 2017 by Origin Classical. The Pythiad is jazz chamber music of subtle structure and powerful intent. Gailloreto has found a compositional path that is equally at home in the rigors of contemporary string quintet composition and the freer, no less disciplined world of improvisation and harmonic stretch.

A pantheon of Chicago’s best musicians, this CD features vocalist Cheryl Wilson, whose instrument is a perfection of sound quality, coloration, precise execution, flawless intonation and diction captured with stunning clarity by the recording teams for this project. Double bassist Christian Dillingham’s intelligent chamber music aesthetic and agreeable ‘figured bass’ promenades and improvisations never stray from each movement’s structural purpose. His colleagues in the Jazz String Quintet - violinists Carmen Kassinger and Lisa Fako, violist Loretta Gillespie and cellist Jill Kaeding - are unique in their wide-ranging capabilities. At once comfortable as chamber music denizens, the four are also at ease in the world of improvisation and freer jazz forms.

A first-class jazz saxophonist in his own right, Gailloreto also plays standard orchestral woodwinds for Chicago Opera Theater, Chicago Chamber Musicians and a raft of other ensembles in the Windy City including his own Jazz String Quintet. The Pythiad is his sixth and most ambitious album to date and includes the title work for soprano saxophone, vocalist and string quintet together with three additional and consequential arrangements for the group by the composer’s mentor Cliff Colnot [tracks 10-12]; The Peacocks (Jimmy Rowles), Three Views of a Secret (Jaco Pastorius) and River (Joni Mitchell) which wind down the CD in a suave and stylish manner.

The Pythiad narrative is cleverly conceived to achieve an acute delicacy of message, thoughtfully organized and holistic, while also innovative and entertaining. The Oracle/narrator (Wilson) invites ten of Greek mythology’s lesser known gods and heroes to Delphi for a dose of pre-Freudian psychotropic psychoanalysis. Casting hypnotic spells over each of her subjects, the Pythia’s predictions and predications waft up from a dark place in the cave of human subconsciousness, spoken by the Oracle in the vernacular of our present moment. “Conjure to your minds images of mail-order divinators, psychics with neon storefronts, and ego-bloated cold-readers on late-night television. But know that in the days of old not a man, woman or god would look on a prophet without awe or fear!”

Lyrics for each of The Pythiad’s several movements including the cautionary introduction above, are the stunning, drop-dead gorgeous, coy and complicated literary achievement of Jim Gailloreto’s son Coleman, who imagines the Oracle reading the beads of each subject - speaking for god, hero and oracle alike in twenty-first century jargon. This hip oracular device works beautifully to ease listeners down a narrative rabbit hole of past, present and future consciousness.

The Pythiad’s first movement Oracle of Delphi [track one] is an invocation, setting the stage for the Pythia to seduce with her soothing, “Come inside take a seat,” and later, “Exhale your woes, when you’re ready we’ll begin.” Beautifully structured, Gailloreto’s string writing is marvelous, colorful and evocative. His soprano sax tone subtle in coloration and chamber music-worthy, creates a lovely, free improvisatory spirit for the rest of the ensemble to swirl and hover around. Hypnosis is suggested and obliged musically as the Pythia coaxes her charges to analytical submission. “Every muscle will relax, every worry fly away. Your memories won’t cut like bronze.” 

The second movement, Caeneus - The Unbroken [track two] is particularly topical considering today’s profiles in gender angst. Born in a female body, but transformed by the gods into a man to match his inner self, the soprano sax as Caeneus opens the movement and sets a reflective mood; immediately serious, yet fragile and vulnerable. There’s nothing superfluous about Gailloreto’s apt and suggestive string underpinnings below Wilson’s loose and easy but consistently honest vocal stylings here. Shimmerous, the two match musical temperaments - voice to soprano sax - and together make vivid, the tale of Caeneus’s triumphs as a great warrior, “Is it pride that weighs you down? Or do you want to stand unbowed?”

Deucalion & Pyrrha - The Survivors [track three] is the Greek version of the Flood myth, its two human heroes repopulating and re-purposing their descendents with the gift of civilization. “Batten down the hatches, for the end will not come slow,” intones the lyric at the beginning of this darkly descriptive and restless movement. Moods change, tonality fluctuates, improvisation swirls as “Heaven’s eyes survey the scene.” 

A poignant violin soliloquy and  lovely solo lament on viola make clear these artists and the ensemble as a whole are at home together in a world of shared intuition and comfortable virtuosity. Wilson’s vocal authority is particularly moving and nuanced as she declaims, “Each shudder prompts a shiver, each groan offers dread.”

Menoeceus - The Ultimate Gift [track four] about the Theban prince who threw himself from the city’s gate to fulfill prophesy and save his people is beautifully composed and simply so, with a lovely tune and moving lyrics, “Let me not fall in despair. So that this curse is cut away.”

The next movement Autolycus - The Rogue and Rapscallion [track 5] highlights Gailloreto’s not inconsiderable compositional credentials in the idiom of contemporary art music. A delicious free form bass improvisation nobly cast by Dillingham gets things going rhythmically, matching Coleman Gailloreto’s wonderfully amusing lyrics, “Lovers steal the heart, actors steal the show. So only thieves can truly give.” Full of feist and mischief, Jim Gailloreto’s sweet and savory sax solos are punctuated by playful sideswipes from strings, while vocalist Wilson continues Autolycus’ nefarious banter about the art of burgling with tongue-in-cheek insouciance. Fun. 

Asclepius - The Great Healer and Atalanta - The Swift [tracks 6 & 7] are each satisfying respites, suffused with original and imaginative chamber ensemble writing for all members of the quintet, filigreed stylishly by Gailloreto’s suave soprano sax pairing with vocalist Wilson’s fragile and poignant scat.

Opening with a mesmerizing solo vocal rumination, “I remember their love, like solid ground,” Philemon and Baucis - A Loving Couple [track 8] is particularly stunning. The opening bars mysterious, yield to high tones on soprano sax that provide emotional anchor to Coleman Gailloreto’s descriptive Delphic incantation, “I remember their love, never ran dry.” The gods blessed Philemon and Baucis with wealth and happiness unto death and decreed them, “oak and linden trees, forever intertwined.” A lovely, moving and sensitively achieved performance.

The  Delphic leitmotif from The Pythiad’s opening bars prepare the listener for the last movement of the work, Diascuri - Inseparable Bros [track 9]. Strings and sax, often in unison, create an edgy color meld, the musical descriptions of the dynamic twins Castor and Pollux chockablock with jazzy slides and attitude. Soprano sax solos augment the composer’s inventive writing for strings. At the peak of her best storytelling, Wilson is also sonically and dramatically in synch with these two defiant bad boys, “Our fists will talk with cracking, each back will guard the other.” 

The Pythiad is trans-generational art; multiple universes interacting in perfect harmony. Mythology, history, psychoanalysis, jazz, contemporary chamber music and literature impeccably realized. Gailloreto, his Jazz String Quintet, Cheryl Wilson’s vocal prowess and Coleman Gailloreto’s lyrics guarantee this CD will wake up minds.  

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review  

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The power of words and storytelling anchor this 2016 Ravello Records CD release To Keep The Dark Away by pianist Gayle Martin. Recorded at Octavan Audio in Yonkers, NY the sound capture by digital editing producer Marlan Barry and studio engineer Ryan Streber is magnificently clean and intimate, while also attending to every nuance of color coaxed from the studio’s in-house instrument by the pianist. 

Martin’s programming for To Keep The Dark Away as the title track makes clear, focuses on music that enhances the already vivid aural imagery of poetry, literature, narrative and legend. Two works written for Martin by American composer Judith Shatin, To Keep The Dark Away inspired by five Emily Dickinson poems and Fantasy on St. Cecilia a redux transcription for solo piano of her 1985 piano concerto The Passion of St. Cecilia; Liszt’s arrangement for piano of Robert Schumann’s lied Widmung; five selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 75 and two Wagner/Liszt transcriptions for piano, Ballade of the Flying Dutchman and Isoldes Liebestod give this disc patent on several levels, not least for originality.

Friedrich Rückert’s poem Widmung (Dedication) [track 1] informed Robert Schumann’s passionate love for his wife Clara and is the opening work of his 1840 song cycle Myrthen, Opus 25, a wedding gift for his wife-to-be. Liszt’s piano only transcription is arguably one of the most beautiful ‘songs without words’ in the keyboard repertoire. Martin’s approach to the piece on this disc is one of sublime elegance, her playing reflective, gentle, caressing and understated, the last gossamer bars embodying poet Friedrich Rückert’s paean; Du meine Seele, du mein Herz/Du meine Wonn’,o du mein Schmerz (You my soul, you my heart/You my rapture, O you my pain.

American composer Judith Shatin explores sound with an informed and inquisitive compositional palette. Her enthrallment with the tonal world at large - a cross genre interest in the banal as well as the brilliant, the electronic as well as the acoustic - informs with even greater clarity the succinct musical imagery and profound messaging of the spoken word.  

Five poems by the enigmatic American recluse Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) inspire Shatin’s 2011 set of fragile, often pointillist and occasionally coy piano miniatures, To Keep the Dark Away [tracks 2-6]. Composed for Martin and premiered by the artist in New York City, The first of the set and the work’s namesake seems to emerge from a grotto - slow ripples of sound that run deep. A short, foggy pianistic discourse on dissipation, like a memory not quite remembered, To Keep the Dark Away emulates Dickinson’s text to a tee, especially the last stanza; ‘Till his best step approaching/We journey to the day/And tell each other how we sung/To keep the dark away.

The next piece in the set, A Glee Possesseth Me, is delightfully light and pointillist, exploring with splashes of color and sweet musical mischief Dickinson’s charming fantasies conjured from her cloistered upstairs bedroom in Amherst; I cannot dance upon my Toes - No Man instructed me/But oftentimes, among my mind/A Glee possesseth me. An Actual Suffering Strengthens is the third piece in the set, inspired by poem 686, They say that “Time assuages.” Shatin’s compositional imagery is impressive. Dark, pounding, persistently anxious in stinted meter and dramatic portent, a short-lived and terse futility permeates the distressed mood of the poem and music like walking barefoot on broken glass; Time is a Test of Trouble/But Not a Remedy/ If such it prove, it prove too/There was no malady.

The Auroral Light sets a magical mood with its mystical pulse and circumnavigation of tonality, like the passage of galaxies through the universe. Hypnotic, the music eventually becomes gaseous and twinkles out, but not before Dickinson/Shatin make clear their personal catechism; Morning is due all/To some - the Night/To an imperial few - The Auroral light. The opening chords of the last piece of the set, Whose Spokes a Dizzy Music Makes, seem to pose an enigma of some kind, then forge ahead through the tonal spectrum, nesting here then flitting there, as does Dickinson’s avian protagonist. Shatin the colorist, has a collaborative partner in Martin, whose clarity of technique, articulation and nuanced narrative helps transform words to sound; Within my Garden, rides a Bird/Upon a single Wheel/Whose spokes a dizzy Music makes/As ‘twere a travelling Mill.

The second Judith Shatin work on this extraordinary disc, Fantasy on St. Cecilia [tracks 12-14] is another commission by pianist Martin from 1996 - a transcription for solo piano of the composer’s 1986 piano concerto The Passion of St. Cecilia. Martin premiered the piano concerto and offers a riveting performance of the three-movement transcription worthy of the sole American laureate to reach the finals of the sixth International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow - the third American woman to do so.

A stunning contrast in compositional style and heft after the appropriately spare, even minimalist delicacies of the Dickinson-inspired To Keep the Dark Away, the first movement titled Her Struggle describes the agonized fore-knowledge of impending martyrdom for music’s patron saint; a cataclysm of smashing chord clusters (arm slams on the keyboard) and foreboding lower register rumblings.

Chaos and self-doubt rake the sound spectrum of the movement. Hope is continually interrupted by quirky, dance-like permutations and macabre harmonic descents into the void. Staggered, off-kilter rhythms and black colors inhabit Her Struggle and leave the listener appropriately drained. 

The second movement, Her Passion, is a musical out-of-body experience. Diatonic ecstasy – Shatin’s colors are spellbinding – take the listener to a different world altogether; subconscious, resigned, metaphysical. Beatitudes, visions of angels and redemption ultimately prevail, as the delicate last bars of the movement attest, but the journey to bliss is never easy.

  The last movement of Fantasy on St. Cecelia is graphic, like Berlioz’ Walk to the Scaffold movement from Symphonie Fantastique. Scary stuff, with a pervading and unsettling restlessness, more dark colors and thick chord clusters. Powerful writing in the lower register for the piano renews the horrifying rhythmic figure of the movement’s opening bars, achieving an hysterical frenzy before plunging resolutely downward to oblivion. Wow! A signature part of Gayle Martin’s portfolio, Fantasy on St. Cecilia shouts the artist’s virtuosity and justifies composer Shatin’s trust. Spectacular!

Also on the CD, a dazzlingly stylish and flawlessly descriptive performance by Martin of five movements from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 75 and two gorgeously executed Wagner/Liszt transcriptions, Ballade of the Flying Dutchman and the exquisite Isoldes Liebestod. 

Kudos to pianist Gayle Martin for a unique CD of cutting edge virtuoso contemporary piano works by composer Judith Shatin, paired beautifully with piano transcriptions of late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century masters Wagner, Liszt and Prokofiev.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit violinist Julie Rosenfeld’s web page

Visit pianist Peter Miyamoto’s website

Visit the School of Music at the University of Missouri

Violinist Julie Rosenfeld and pianist Peter Miyamoto have produced a stunning CD for Albany Records, New Music for Violin and Piano, which is a must-own for professional violinists and collaborative pianists scouting fresh repertoire. Both artists are on the faculty at the University of Missouri School of Music-Columbia and have enjoyed extensive careers singly and more recently, as a duo.

When the College of Arts and Science at UM offered start up funds for a CD of original works to celebrate her joining the music faculty in 2014 Rosenfeld wasted no time, commissioning music from several composers she knows well including Kenneth Fuchs, Katherine Hoover, John Halle, Laura Kaminsky and Tamar Muskal. Rosenfeld also invited her new colleague Stefan Freund of the UM School of Music Composition and Music Theory faculty to contribute a piece to the project.

After additional funds were raised to cover costs including the superb sound engineering services of five-time GRAMMY Award-winning producer Judith Sherman, the first recording sessions began in April 2017. Released by Albany in 2018 the result is a wide-ranging and superbly eclectic set of six new masterpieces for violin and piano duo composed between 2014 and 2016.

Uniquely American in temperament and color Kenneth Fuchs’ Duo for Violin and Piano (2015) is alive with simple yet glorious imagery. A solo reverie for fiddle in the middle of the piece becomes nimbus - starlight, cosmos, infinity - then morphs with an increasingly intoxicating pulse and lilt into a joyous narrative of ecstasy; a significant, challenging and extremely beautiful new addition to the repertoire.

Dancing (2014) is Katherine Hoover’s three-movement contribution to Rosenfeld’s treasure trove of new music for violin and piano. Arabesque - its jazzy, casual canter belying deeper intension; Cortege - empowered by purposeful regret and poignant reminiscence, without doubt one of Hoover’s most beautiful sound miniatures and Stomp, a 21st century barn dance packed with dervish energy and a Rodeo finish elevate this piece to the category, fabulous!

John Halle’s Amen Choruses (2016) is immediately accessible to the listener, a gauzy jazz temperament lending subtle, gospel ambiance to its uplifting mission, while Laura Kaminsky’s Undercurrent (2015) scans the subconscious depths of the human psyche with mesmerizing colors hued in quarter tone malaise and propelled by pitch slides and ominous low chords on the piano. The piece occasionally reaches the bright surface but like the Gulf Stream, ultimately runs silent, swift and deep. An important if harrowing addition to the violin/piano duo pantheon.

Tamar Muskal’s Where Do We Belong? A Conversation with Bach (2015) is a complex cipher. Solo fiddle machinations, including pitch slides and harmonic anomalies remind us we are in the twenty-first century, but the composer also unambiguously harkens in spirit at least, to the solo partitas and sonatas of Bach. Where Do We Belong? is a kind of trans-century experience, exploring the violin temperament and colors Bach found so fascinating, while also shapeshifting without apology, to reflect a present and future aesthetic.

Life (Still) Goes on (2015) is Stefan Freund’s intriguing, episodic and ultimately hopeful homage not just to his father, but humankind and its quirky survivability. Somehow, despite often cataclysmic setbacks, the human pulse (literally) continues, bringing this wonderfully engineered and superbly performed disc full circle.

Considering all six works were commissioned specifically for violinist Rosenfeld and each is receiving its world premiere on this disc, the listener comes away satisfied the interpretations are definitive. Superb technical authority and a subtlety of collaborative ensemble playing between Rosenfeld and Miyamoto brings a bracing energy and excitement to these virtuoso new works.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit Gerry Bryant’s web site

Download a PDF of the review

Listen to Gerry Bryant’s interpretation of Take Five

Watch my interview with Gerry Bryant about four more of his CDs: Musical Moments, Rhapsodic, The Romance Continues and Chasing The Clouds Away

Los Angeles-based pianist, composer and attorney Gerry Bryant embodies what American composer Gunther Schuller dubbed in 1957 the Third Stream. Schuller was convinced the melding of classical and jazz idioms into a hybrid third genre was inevitable. Bryant’s life as a professional musician dovetails nicely with his several activities as an attorney and board member of California Lawyers for the Arts, a legal rights advocacy network that helps artists navigate the intricacies of contracts and intellectual property. Bryant has not only hybridized his tastes and talents in his music-making, but also his dual careers as musician and lawyer.

 Bryant’s 2013 Interpretations CD is infused with the pianist’s life-long passion for classical music, which was honed and disciplined during his studies at Harvard. His penchant for jazz improvisation found viable expression at gigs he played off campus during his Harvard years. This conflation of classical training and jazz intuition has enabled him to indulge his keen understanding of counterpoint, structure, harmony and the arc of musical narrative.

Hymn in G is the first of three original Bryant pieces on the Interpretations CD and presents itself in a more or less straightforward classical manner, mildly tweaked with jazz chords and discreet improvisations. Mark Cargill joins Bryant for the first of only two occasions on the otherwise solo piano CD to play the composer’s fetching hymn tune on violin and viola over Bryant’s gently rolling chordal support.

Bryant’s deliberate decision to emphasize the funereal pulse in Chopin’s E Minor Prelude No. 4, Op. 28 sets the emotional stage for an imaginative segue to Paul Desmond’s version of Dave Brubeck’s Take Five. Beginning softly with the same E Minor chord that concludes the Bach, Bryant keeps the same tempo for Take Five. The listener hears Brubeck’s otherwise lilting 5/4 tune at a more searching and deliberate pace – the result is rewarding. In the last few seconds of Bryant’s Take Five he allows for an up-tempo fragment of the famous Brubeck tune as if to break the spell he has created.

 Track 4 is another delightful Bryant composition, Savannah & Kealan. Spirited and playful, with tricky but fun chordal design that surprises delightfully, the piece promenades a collection of jazz stylings laced with easy-going improvisations. An Erik Satie-styled intro to track 5, an innovative take on John Denver’s Sunshine on My Mind somehow makes perfect sense in Bryant’s interpretation, sustaining the casual, walking pace of the disc. Mellow, like the tune’s author, lilting briefly in cut-time, then back to the somnambulism of Gymnopédies, Bryant’s interpretive confidence makes for a solid improvisatory fabric that glows with sunshine and sensibility.

Track 6 is the first movement Rondo from master Bryant’s earliest compositional portfolio circa age 15. Charmingly naïve but seriously intentioned, the piece is just over a minute of creative earnestness in the style of Haydn. One imagines the puzzlement of Gerry’s teenage buds in Cleveland’s inner city ‘hood.

Carrying the listener out to sea – it’s all about tonality – Bryant’s take on Christopher Cross’ Sailing includes the first and only broadly dramatic pianistic outburst on the disc during the intro, but soon settles back into the walking pace that characterizes the entire album. Bryant’s intelligently jazz-morphed takes on Alfredo Catalani’s aria In Sogno and Chopin’s Etude No. 7 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 25 set the stage for a marvelous interpretive journey through a medley of movie scores on track 10 including The Music of the Night, Phantom of the Opera, and an appropriately funky riff on Think of Me. Stitched together beautifully, Bryant’s improvisations are lovely and mood-changing. Interesting use of registration and voice leading successfully connect the musical dots between the three films.

Discreetly Jazz-influenced interpretations of the third movement from Bach’s Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother BWV 992 and Chopin’s Nocturne No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 72 bookend Bryant’s beautifully nuanced take on Henri Mancini’s song It’s Easy to Say from the film 10. A thoughtfully elegant improv on Edith Piaf’s La Vie en Rose segues into the last track on the disc, violinist Mark Cargill joining Bryant again for a completely “straight” performance of the timeless Méditation from Massenet’s opera Thaïs.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Click here to download a readable PDF of the complete review.

Click here to listen to Robert Cassidy play Grave, quasi recitative from Joel Feigin's Four Elegies

Pianist Robert Cassidy’s new solo piano CD Pathways - MSR Classics/MS1604/$12.95/ www.msrcd.com - takes the listener on an unexpectedly intriguing and intellectually satisfying musical journey. Matching seemingly disparate composers Chopin, Debussy, and Joel Feigin to reveal their mutual commonality, Cassidy has assembled a recording that should be in every serious classical music lover’s collection. Debussy’s Preludes Pour Piano, Livre II serves as the major work on the album, but it is American composer Joel Feigin’s Four Elegies for Piano: In Memoriam Renée Longy that connects the dots and enlightens on this CD. Feigin’s moving homage to his ear-training teacher at Juilliard speaks to her unequivocal French character through implied colorations and tonal resting points that hint, not surprisingly, of Debussy. Cassidy misses none of this interconnectedness, further rewarding the listener with Chopin’s super romantic, pre-impressionist Barcarolle in F-Sharp Major, Op. 60.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit Mike Vaccaro’s Chamber Music of John Scott CD page - watch the interview, read my review

Visit Mike Vacarro’s Almost Alone: Solo Clarinet Suites by John Scott CD page, watch the interview

Los Angeles-based maestro of woodwinds Mike Vaccaro is a clarinetist, the foundation instrument from which his doubling career in the highly competitive world of Los Angeles film and TV studio gigs began. A musical polyglot, Vaccaro has mastered several wind instruments over the course of his impressive career as a professional musician, beginning in his late teens with road trips playing in the Woody Herman and Stan Kenton bands. After stints playing shows in Las Vegas, Vaccaro returned to his home town of Los Angeles as his portfolio grew to include C clarinet, Bb clarinet, A clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, piccolo, Eb flute, alto flute, soprano sax, alto sax, tenor sax, baritone sax, oboe, English horn, bansuri flutes, alto recorder, tenor recorder, sax synthesizer, and likely a handful more.

The astonishing and fun result of this wide-ranging woodwind expertise is Vaccaro’s 1996 CD, Journeyman. Six works on the album offer a unique opportunity for listeners to enjoy a little sampler of chamber music Hollywood film and TV composers create in their spare time for friends. Mark Davidson (Prologue); Nick Venden (Circumsdance-5); Richard Bowden (Whimsey); Allen Davis (The Celestial Ascension and In A Quiet Place); and Don Harper (Carnival 2000) contribute music to Vaccaro’s multi-track - he plays all the wind parts - Journeyman disc. LA colleagues on the CD include a knockout cameo performance by vocalist Judith Dunlore, who lends magical color and otherworldly non-verbal vocal magic to the transcendent conclusion of The Celestial Ascension, and LA-perfect professional ensemble support provided by co-journeymen Allen Davis synthesizer, Peter Woodford guitar, Larry Walters bass, Brian Miller drums, Victor Peterson percussion, and Tom Ranier keyboards who jam with Vaccaro on the last two tracks, In A Quiet Place and Carnival 2000.

There is plenty of challenging technical material to keep Vaccaro busy in Mark Davidson’s Prologue for bass clarinet, clarinet, and flute, the playful opening track on the CD. Terpsichore is the take away from this delightful opener. Multi-track editing by Vaccaro is superb, the blend of these three instrumental colors delicious, intonation spot-on. Nick Venden’s Circumsdance-5 shows off Vaccaro’s English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, flute, and piccolo chops. A moody, bluesy attitude, including a wonderful oboe solo and accented rhythms, gives the opening section of the work a delightful sense of laid back urbanity. A minimalist middle section is masterfully constructed, thoughtful, and rhythmically intoxicating. A completely unexpected postlude for solo English horn is a wonderful surprise and demonstrates Venden’s coy compositional tomfoolery. The piece ends with a smiling flourish. Wonderful writing.

Richard Bowden’s Whimsey is also masterfully conceived and constructed. Clarinet, Eb clarinet, baritone sax, soprano sax, tenor sax, oboe, bass clarinet, piccolo, flute, English horn are the most readily recognizable instruments in Vaccaro’s monumental track stack for this thickly orchestrated wind piece. Episodic, Whimsey explores among other things, sounds and memories. Twists and turns in the narrative – a playful street dance, a Stravinsky-like moment for winds, an extended duo for clarinet and oboe, a clever jazz homage, a nod to Laurel and Hardy, and a wild alto sax improve solo - delight the ear and tickle the imagination.

Allen Davis’ mystical 17- minute masterpiece The Celestial Ascension features flute, clarinet, and recorder choirs, all performed and edited masterfully by Vaccaro. A tone poem, the piece begins amorphously then becomes more focused as it samples medieval polyphony (recorder choir), mid-nineteenth century romantic angst (clarinet choir), and an array of colorful woodwind conversations in various styles. High and low winds chatting and occasionally finding sweet accord in rich wind sonority, the work reaches a calm in its last minutes, setting the scene for a magical ascension effect; vocal colorizations, tone drifts, and echoes sung by Vaccaro colleague Judith Dunlore.

Composer Davis sits down at the synthesizer to join Vaccaro, this time playing tenor sax, for an amazing ensemble performance of Davis’ In a Quiet Place, a straight up and luxuriant jazz gem. Colleagues Larry Walters bass, Brian Miller drums, Victor Peterson percussion, Peter Woodford guitar, and Tom Ranier keyboards join the others for Don Harper’s rock/jazz delight, Carnival 2000, a fun piece that shows off Vaccaro's flute skills in particular and brings this unique disc, handsomely produced by Peter Woodford, to a happy close.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Rhythm and its changeability excite the music of American composer David S. Bernstein. A mind teeming with interesting ideas and fascinating ways to structure them, Bernstein’s sound layering can be dense; in its darkest corners, lots of raw but always keenly focused power. Because he is also a master of color, imagery, and nuanced memory, episodes of transcendent beauty dot the landscape of Bernstein’s music, enriching the narrative, and igniting the imagination. Discussions take place, seasons change, there is questioning and doubt; the composer's musical world is all too human, immediate and engaging. The form and sensibility of Bernstein’s craft, his gift for clear messaging, make a first encounter immediately satisfying.

A first-class sampling of five fascinating and beautifully constructed chamber works from Bernstein’s catalogue is offered on an impeccably produced CD by North Pacific Music – NPM LD 035 titled Late Autumn Moods and Images. Included on the disc are Bernstein’s Late Autumn Moods and Images for Violin, Cello, and Piano; Petite Suite Chromatique for Cello and Piano; Quadralogues III for Violin, Viola, Cello, and Piano; Quadralogues II for Flute, Oboe, Percussion, and Piano; and Six Sound Sculptures for Clarinet and Piano.

Superlative performances are turned in by a broad sampling of the Pacific Northwest’s best musicians including Principal Violist Joël Belgique of the Oregon Symphony; Joel Bluestone, head of the Percussion Department at Portland State University; Principal Flutist David Buck of the Oregon Symphony; Hamilton Cheifetz, Principal Cello of the Oregon Ballet Theatre and member of the music faculty at Portland State University; Alexandre Dossin, a member of the piano faculty at the University of Oregon School of Music; Barbara Heilmair, Assistant Professor of Clarinet at Portland State University; Principal Cellist of the Oregon Symphony Nancy Ives; Susan DeWitt Smith, pianist for Portland’s Third Angle New Music Ensemble; violinist Inés Voglar, Artistic Director of Portland’s fEARnoMUSIC and a member of the violin section of the Oregon Symphony; and Karen Wagner, Assistant Principal Oboe of the Oregon Symphony.

The disc’s namesake, Late Autumn Moods and Images for Violin (Voglar), Cello (Ives), and Piano (Dossin) is loaded with harmonic drama and restless rhythmic moodiness. All three artists perform the three-movement work to perfection. Petite Suite Chromatique for Cello (Cheifetz), and Piano (DeWitt Smith) is magical. In four movements, Bernstein explores both instruments’ color capability and technical versatility to good effect. Quadralogues III for Violin (Voglar), Viola (Belgique), Cello (Ives), and Piano (Dossin) is full of raw power, yet sensibly ordered and contained. Quick shifts in temperament both expressive and aggressive lead to a sizzling finale with stellar performances by Voglar, Belgique, Ives, and Dossin.

An exciting color change is provided by Bernstein’s Quadralogues II for Flute (Buck), Oboe (Wagner), Percussion (Bluestone), and Piano (DeWitt Smith). An aural treat for listeners, Bernstein hobnobs compositionally over an array of keyboard and other percussion instruments and timbres which punctuate, usually gently, several deliciously vaporous piano meditations in the two-movement work. A perfect example of Bernstein’s mastery of craft and arch, Quadralogues II is a find. Likewise, the last work on the CD, Six Sound Sculptures for Clarinet (Heilmair) and Piano (DeWitt Smith). Short tableaux for the instrument, Bernstein again reveals his impeccable craft and sophisticated taste. Skilled writing for clarinet, performed with virtuoso finesse by Heilmair, animate these lovely cameos. Heilmair’s tone is writ large as well as whisper gentle, illuminating both the music and her experienced control over degrees of dynamic flux that give the instrument a wide-ranging capacity for colorful narrative. Pianist DeWitt Smith is a collaborative jewel throughout. Sound Sculptures are just that; delightful, always interesting and succinctly pointillistic – a good listen and important addition to the clarinet recital repertoire.

Jack Gabel at NPM has single-handedly captured on this disc the delicate interactions brought to the studio by these diverse ensembles and instruments without the slightest electronic taint. The sound quality on this CD is clean, the editing seamless. And the performances by these wonderful pros of the Pacific Northwest, inspiring!   

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Listen to the Second Movement - Scherzo: Wuchtig 

This beautifully packaged 2 CD set is without doubt, the most exhilarating recording of Gustav Mahler's deeply moving Symphony No. 6 (Tragic) I have ever heard - on several levels. The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and its extraordinary conductor, Benjamin Zander, offer a live recording from Boston's historic Symphony Hall that is nothing less than perfection. The Symphony's sprawling four movements - a monumental test of endurance and musicianship - sparkle with energy from first note to last. Consistently superb intonation, nuanced phrasing, extraordinary sectional and solo playing, and an electrifying urgency of intellectual purpose and message, drive the imagination and nurture the soul - a recording to cherish, extol, and pass along to others.

The sound capture on this recording is equally gratifying. Little wonder, these are the same engineers responsible for the Boston Symphony's last two Grammy-winning triumphs. Minuscule detail - the famous sound of distant cowbells, the tinkle of a triangle - can be discerned with pristine clarity, while Mahler's gigantic orchestral climaxes are allowed full-throated sonic resonance.

A performance of such exquisite beauty and profound depth is no accident. Maestro Zander is one of the world's great Mahler interpreters and the incredible musicians of the Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra attend to his vision willingly and with spirit in this recording. The result; a vividly colorful narrative of the human condition that explores the composer's complex psyche and illuminates the tender mercies and bittersweet longings of Mahler's inner world.                            

Daniel Kepl/Performing Arts Review

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Visit Joanna Estelle’s website

Read the CD booklet

Learn more about Neil Douglas-Klotz and his Prayers of the Cosmos

Watch my interview with Joanna Estelle about her Transmutation CD

Canadian composer, lyricist and arranger Joanna Estelle has arrived at an artistic Rubicon with the 2018 Navona Records release of her first CD Emergence. The title is not cursory, for it distills in one word “The process of coming into being” that has been Estelle’s personal and artistic journey of the past several years.

Estelle was in her forWatch ties before she took the courageous decision to free herself of the expectations of others and soar with the angels. Completing her undergraduate degree in music in 2009 at the University of Ottawa, an achievement undertaken over a span of eight years while working her day job as an accountant for the Canadian government, Estelle graduated summa cum laude on the Dean's list as winner of the Faculty of Art's silver medal. She quit her job with the government that same year and began graduate study at York University in Toronto. She is currently pursuing further studies at the doctoral level.

Joanna Estelle has served on the National Board of Directors for the Association of Canadian Women Composers (2004-2014) and is a member of the Founding Board of Ottawa New Music Creators. Her Joanna Estelle Commemorative Scholarship Fund is a bequest to the University of Ottawa to encourage other women to find their musical voices.

Talent, training, study, perspicacity, faith and above all discipline and self-esteem are immediate gut takeaways from this marvelously diverse sampling of Joanna Estelle’s work. Collaborative assistance from colleagues John Gordon Armstrong (arranger), Laurence Ewashko (baritone), Morgan Strickland, Susan Elizabeth Brown and Laura Dziubaniuk (soprano), Brandon Wilkie and Roland Gjernes (cello), Frédéric Lacroix (piano), and two choral ensembles, Ewashko Singers and Capital Chamber Choir bring distinct cachet and color to each of the pieces on this premiere disc.

Pianist Frédéric Lacroix is featured in several chamber ensemble pieces on the CD, but is given a lovely opportunity to shine as a soloist in 10 brief and charmingly simple Umori (Moods), the first set of pieces on the Emergence CD. Soprano Morgan Strickland has a voice of genuine purity and round tone, handsomely displayed in three Estelle songs of great beauty; Susannah’s Lullaby (This is a Face of Love) with Lacroix, Language of a Rose and Qu’est-ce que c’est la vie? (Tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales with cellist Brandon Wilkie and pianist Lacroix. The three artists soar together quite naturally, the result of Estelle’s songwriting craft and elegant sense of style.

Another beautifully fashioned song in folk character Moyi mamij (For My Mother) brings together soprano Laura Dziubaniuk and baritone Laurence Ewashko - two superbly balanced instruments - for a heartfelt and emotionally powerful vocal duo, sustained admirably by cellist Wilkie and pianist Lacroix (nice writing for the two). Soprano Susan Elizabeth Brown and cellist Roland Gjernes bring a clean, contemplative, even fragile Bach-like delicacy to Estelle’sAbwoon d’bwashmaya (Aramaic Lord’s Prayer).

John Gordan Armstrong’s wonderful arrangement for chorus and soloist of Estelle’sWater Canticle (For Margaret Trudeau) is a beauty. Armstrong’s sensitivity to Estelle’s aesthetic - a perfect synergy between the two is apparent - has created an exceptional collaborative result, performed nicely by the Ewashko Singers, featuring tenor Robert Ryan with pianist Aude Urbancic.Likewise, Armstrong’s arrangement for the Capital Chamber Choir of Estelle’s Child of the Manger. The Capital Chamber Choir also performs Estelle’s La chanson de ton coeur (The Song of Your Heart) with pianist Sonya Sweeney.

The last work on Joanna Estelle’s Emergence CD is also its most complex and satisfying. Song for Abwoon offers an 11 minute overview of Estelle’s compositional ambitions and orchestration skills. Written for chorus (Ewashko Singers), soprano solo (Brown), cello (Wilkie), two flutes (Jeffrey Miller,Pascale Margely), oboe (Frédéric Hodgson), violin (Brigitte Amyot), viola (Kevin James), cello (Jean-François Marquis) and bass (Peter Kilpatrick)Song for Abwoon hints at things to come from this unique and now fully liberated musical voice.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit saxophonist/composer Darryl Yokley’s website

View British visual artist David Emmanuel Noel’s paintings commissioned for Pictures at an African Exhibition

Composer/saxophonist Darryl Yokley has described his 2018 Truth Revolution Recording Collective release Pictures at an African Exhibition as a jazz symphony. Yokley has opted for a big brush approach to instrumentation, including a wind ensemble of 12 players in addition to the five members of his band Sound Reformation. The 13-movement result, while indebted in spirit to Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition is entirely original. And not unlike Mussorgsky’s masterpiece, Yokley’s brilliantly conceived and highly entertaining Pictures at an African Exhibition already has legs, with performances over the past year enthusiastically received around the world. Darryl Yokley’s Pictures at an African Exhibition has raised the bar of expectation in the growing genre of large, multi-movement and purposeful jazz compositions. Jazz symphony, indeed!

Mussorgsky’s narrative premise - a visitor promenading through an art exhibit, the composer describing with musical imagery, several paintings the visitor sees- has been turned around by Yokley, commissioning British visual artist David Emmanuel Noel to create artworks that convey the composer’s 13 distinct musical titles: First Sunrise; Migration; Ubuntu; Stories from the Village Elder; Ominous Nightfall; Hunting Natives; The Birth of Swing; Echoes of Ancient Sahara; Genocide March; Mines of Diamonds, Crimson and Gold; Cry The Beloved Country; Blessings from the Bennu and New Sunrise.

Pictures at an African Exhibition sequences through 13 historical tableau using a device that worked well for Mussorgsky; a central narrative protagonist. Yokley’s alto sax is tour guide for this exhibition iteration, his often optimistic improvisatory suave acting as guidepost and guardrail through the wonderful big band craziness and many beautifully written cameos and vignettes of Migration. Ubuntu is already a hit single, Yokley’s keen sense of orchestration (the bass clarinet/sax bits for example) coloring this movement beautifully. Stories from the Village Elder is magical for its wise, peaceful temperament, while Ominous Nightfall presents Yokley’s credentials as a composer for wind ensemble.

A superb and mesmerizing drum solo by Nasheet Waits segues the listener fatalistically from Ominous Nightfall to the horrors of Hunting Natives, a further example of Yokley’s command of orchestration. Sound imagery in The Birth of Swing is so powerful (the lapping surf sounds) one can “see” vividly, that gate through which Africans were herded in chains to ships for the slave trade journey to North America. Echoes of Ancient Sahara, an homage to African Moorish styles in a surround of sophisticated jazz club couture contrasts starkly with Genocide March, it’s little drummer boy cadence in the opening bars soon morphing to grotesquery and Mines of Diamonds, Crimson and Gold, a death march reminding us that Africans are still slaves on their own continent.

The hard but necessary segments of Yokley’s epic historical journey addressed, Pictures at an African Exhibition salves hurt with joy in its last three tracks. Cry The Beloved Country is just plain stand-alone sweet, busy, jazzy and classy with a wonderful tenor sax improv and more. Blessings from the Bennu, rich in magical colors and imaginative development (the solo piano riff midway through the movement is mesmerizing) segues naturally into the last track New Sunrise, a delightful wrap for a fascinating and difficult project.

Sensitive as well as spectacular performances by Darryl Yokley primarily on tenor but also alto sax (tracks 4 and 12) with members of Sound Reformation Zaccai Curtis piano, Luques Curtis bass and Gimbri, Wayne Smith J.R. drums and chains and special guest Nasheet Waits drums. The superb wind ensemble Yokley assembled for this disc are Kevin Willois and Ellen Fisher Deerburg flutes; Marie Trudeau oboe and English horn; Kenneth Ellison and Deno Orkin clarinets; Gregory Riley bass clarinet; Zachary Feingold bassoon, Jonathan Powell and Josh Lawrence trumpets; Marshall Sealy French horn; David Gibson trombone and Brent White bass trombone.

Visual artist/collaborator David Emmanuel Noel describes the pageant of Yokley’s vision in Pictures at an African Exhibition as “capturing a continent’s milestones, from the celebration of life and execution of cultural creativity, to human struggle and the emancipation of a diaspora.” Yokley’s music is the source material for this CD and is by itself complete, When the listener also takes time to pair the music with Noel’s artwork for each track (easily accessible online), the aesthetic reward doubles. Mussorgsky and painter Vicktor Hartmann found each other and created a masterpiece together. So too, composer Darryl Yokley and visual artist David Emmanuel Noel. Art begets art.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit Rain Worthington’s website

Read From the 8BC to Carnegie Hall: The improbable journey of composer Rain Worthington

American composer Rain Worthington channels her spirit through the medium of chromatics; repetitive descending half step fragments become gateways to her deeply personal sound world. Worthington’s 2016 Navona Records release Dream Vapors expresses poignantly, the composer’s fascination with reality and unreality, how modality and meditative pulse can channel and inform. There are seven tone poems on this disc, each illustrative of Worthington’s fascinating and idiomatic subconscious.

Shredding Glass, Reversing Mirrors in the Quiet, Tracing a Dream, Fast Through Dark Winds, Within a Dance, Yet Still Night and Of Time Remembered are indeed vaporous; reflections on emotional remembrance, cathartic experience, continuation and disintegration. The composer has not charted an easy journey for her listeners, yet when embraced with open mind and ears, the cumulative effect of these dramatic meditative projections in sound is cleansing. Outstanding and beautifully balanced audio engineering adds luster to performances by the Czech Philharmonic (Shredding Glass, Yet Still Night); Moravian Philharmonic (Reversing Mirrors in the Quiet, Fast Through Dark Winds, Within a Dance, Of Time Remembered ) and Russian Philharmonic (Tracing a Dream).

Shredding Glass for Orchestra (2004) is Worthington’s painful memory of the Twin Towers attack of 9/11/2001. Eerie descending chromatics, like those drifting pieces of paper fluttering down from the devastated buildings we saw and remember so well; a tonal mood of impending calamity given weight by chilling low orchestral grumblings and insistent rhythmic pulses of foreboding; an isolated piano fragment one might hear from outside a nearby apartment building drifts briefly into then out of the haunting soundscape. These terse sonic subtexts finally culminate after uninterrupted anxiety and horror in an inevitable drift, like the dust clouds after the collapse; no resolution, no peace. The incomprehensible expressed in sound. Powerful.

Worthington describes Reversing Mirrors in the Quiet for Small Orchestra (2014) as “the subtle shifting of perceptions between reflection, translucence and transparency.” Her choice of dark, enigmatic harmonic colors hints at lessons yet to be learned and leaves the listener pondering the composer’s sound vocabulary in reverse order - translucence, transparency and when all is said and done, reflection. Something about mirrors unsettles some corner of our collective psyche and Rain Worthington explores these goblins with salutary conviction and insight. In Tracing a Dream for Orchestra (2009) Worthington adds occasional mallet percussion to brighten, like sunlight streaking through storm clouds, otherwise dark orchestral imagery.

Fast Through Dark Winds for Small Orchestra (2013) describes a fearful dream experienced by the composer. The imagery is of a bicyclist whose brakes have failed, careening through dark night fog. No doubt triggered by Worthington’s personal unease about her family history, Fast Through Dark Winds is a latter day Legend of Sleepy Hollow. No headless horseman, rather the fear of losing one’s psychic head gives the work frisson.

Within a Dance: A Tone Poem of Love for Small Orchestra (2012) speaks to humankind’s predilection to reflect on events long past, while Yet Still Night: A Nocturne for Orchestra (2001) seeks comfort in resignation as the composer makes clear in her annotation, “dreams and conflict will continue, insistent and inconsolable.”

Of Time Remembered, the last piece on the disc deserves its “Proustian memory” analogue. Descending chromatic fragments, terse repeating sequences and an ambiguous harmonic structure help convey the composer’s artistic ambition to tap into “subconscious rooms and pathways where memories play like shadows cast against a screen of emotion.”

There is nothing accidental or contrived about Rain Worthington’s fixation on troubling realities in Dream Vapors. Her grandmother and mother succumbed to Vascular Dementia disease. Worthington recounts how these experiences so close to her own psychic wellbeing have made her “acutely aware of the tenuousness of ‘reality’ and how fragile the fine lines are drawn between real, imagined or dream perceptions.”

Rain Worthington’s Dream Vapors CD is an attempt to understand through music, the whirlpool into which her loved ones descended against their conscious will and never returned, even as their corporeal bodies remained behind. Heady stuff, good for the soul.

All proceeds from sales of Dream Vapors accrue to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Buy the music to Respighi’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in D minor

Visit Jameson Cooper’s website

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Music Lovers cherish Italian composer Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) for his powerfully visual orchestral tone poems The Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome and Roman Festivals. His works for chamber orchestra also captivate the imagination by achieving wondrous levels of orchestral imagery. Respighi’s flair for sound color animates The Birds and Brazilian Impressions, which reimagine the already descriptive melodies of Renaissance and Baroque animist composers. Ancient Airs and Dances, three chamber orchestra suites inspired by lute pieces from the 16th and 17th centuries conjure technicolor daydreams of courtly life in Respighi’s brilliantly fleshed out orchestrations.

Considering his popularity as a colorist, it’s a bit puzzling Respighi’s not immodest portfolio of vocal and instrumental chamber music has been programmed less frequently. Violinist Jameson Cooper, with scholarly as well as collaborative assist from pianist Eli Kalman has produced a magnificent antidote to this conundrum. The duo’s 2018 Centaur release Nebbie: Music for Violin and Piano by Ottorino Respighi resonates with energy and finesse, revealing a composer of refined taste and temperament; the vast landscapes of his orchestral writing reduced like great poetry, to exquisite miniature.

Recorded in the Music Hall of the Arts and Communications Center at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and mastered meticulously by Kevin Harbison, the program on this revelatory CD is a beauty. Three of Respighi’s most elegant and descriptive songs, Nebbie (mists); Pioggia (rain) and Lo Sono la Madre (I am the mother) in thoughtful adaptations for violin and piano by Jameson Cooper serve as sweet meditations between two signature masterpieces, the lesser known Violin and Piano Sonata in D minor (1897) and the slightly more familiar Violin and Piano Sonata in B minor (1917).

Violinist Jameson Cooper is Artist In Residence at the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts, Indiana University South Bend. Founding first violinist of the Euclid Quartet, whose repertoire is as vast and interwoven as string theory - Haydn passing through Marsalis - Cooper is able to look afresh at late nineteenth century repertoire and discover sunbursts, postulate subtexts and execute complicated passagework with intuitive vigor and expressive self-confidence.

Pianist Eli Kalman, who discovered and performed the premiere of the Violin Sonata in D minor is Professor of Piano at the Department of Music University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. He is the perfect embodiment of the best of old school, a steadying yin to Cooper’s eagerly emphatic yang. Kalman’s solid musicality and tempered understanding of give and take, statement and response anchor both sonatas in late romantic turf where they rightly belong. The three songs on this disc, quite freely and interestingly reimagined by Cooper are fluid, even impressionistic. Kalman and Cooper have forged a delightful artistic marriage for this CD, their distinct temperaments conflating to a union of superb artistic quality.

The Violin and Piano Sonata in D minor (1897) is first up on the disc and because it is so little known, surprises. Highly romantic in the best of all passionate ways, extraordinarily mellifluous, soaring and propulsive, its three movements look back to Schumann but also tap into a premonition of the free-spirited harmonic experimentation that would become fashionable with the impressionists a few years later. The first movement Lento, Allegro and particularly the second movement Adagio are pure Brahms, breathtakingly earnest and unaffected, performed with exquisite collaborative sensitivity by both artists. The last movement Scherzo dips carefully from time to time into twentieth century tonality but finds comfort still, in steadfast romanticism. An incredible discovery, the dynamic performance on this disc will convince colleagues the effort involved in preparing and adding the sonata to their recital portfolios will be rewarded handsomely; a solid and deeply moving work, performed with enlightened certainty about its place in the repertoire by the duo.

Jameson Cooper’s reimagining for violin and piano of three Respighi art songs Nebbie, Pioggia and Lo Sono la Madre are fresh mini-masterpieces in their new and expertly conceived setting. Cooper’s mastery of the violin and its expressive capability, his extraordinarily rich tone and inspiring execution of these “new works” grace and make clear, his command of the art of transcription; neither imitative nor condescending. Rather, wholly recreated, reinvented, revoiced. Respighi’s three songs are now new jewels in the violin/piano repertory.

Another monumental Respighi achievement, the Violin and Piano Sonata in B minor (1917) is honored by Cooper and Kalman with a glorious performance that highlights its virtuosity but more importantly, Respighi’s unbridled passion - an intimacy at once disarming and enlightening. Not unaware of the world falling apart around him in 1916-1917 as the First World War ravaged centuries of European certainty and established order, the B Minor sonata longs for what will never be again. Resignation is the path to redemption and Respighi takes the listener on that journey. Cooper gives the work lavish expressive license, ably vouchsafed by Kalman at the keyboard.

Definitive interpretations all, this CD sheds new light on a composer whose orchestral showmanship was nonpareil, but whose soul resided in his chamber music.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Buy the CD, contact Mike Vaccaro

Visit composer John Scott’s Wikipedia page

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Visit Mike Vaccaro’s Journeyman CD page: watch the interview, read my review

Visit Mike Vaccaro’s Almost Alone CD page: watch the interview

Emmy Award-winning composer John Scott’s delicious morsels

British film and television composer John Scott and Hollywood studio woodwind artist Mike Vaccaro have known each other for several decades, traversing in tandem the tangled, often fickle, sometimes treacherous, always gratifying but no-nonsense world of scoring and recording for the television and film-making industry. Vaccaro has done well by learning how to play virtually every woodwind instrument and then a few to perfection. Subbing at the level of virtuosity required of Hollywood studio musicians has been the mana of Vaccaro’s career, not only in Hollywood and Vegas but during his youth, playing in the bands of some of the biggest names in American jazz.

Ditto John Scott, whose youthful career as a clarinetist/saxophonist and harpist in Britain’s big bands mirrors Vaccaro’s. Eventually, as Scott began arranging, then composing music for film and television in America as well as the UK, the two met on a sound stage in Hollywood and the artistic bond has been strong ever since.

Like most Los Angeles and London-based studio musicians, Scott and Vaccaro have extensive experience performing classical music as well as jazz and a half dozen other genres. Scott as composer/conductor, has his own portfolio of works including at last count a symphony, four string quartets and a ballet, not to mention his catalogue of over 100 film and television scores. Vaccaro has subbed with various professional orchestras in the Los Angeles area over the years and enjoys a passion for chamber music. Vaccaro’s CD label ADC Recordings catalogues not only his formidable talents as a professional studio musician, but the company he keeps; his friends and colleagues in the business.

Vaccaro’s latest CD release, The Chamber Music of John Scott: and other delicious morsels is mostly an homage to Scott - the composer’s Clarinet Quintet and Sax Quartet: A Week in October. Also on the CD, three works by Vaccaro’s colleague, saxophonist Damon Zick, his Hector, Desmond and Titus for Sax Quartet, Three for Four for Sax Quartet and Nada Pero Máquinas (Nothing But Machines) for Sax Quartet.

To flesh out the disc, the Allemande from Bach’s Sonata in A minor for Solo Flute, Vacarro illustrating ably, his skills on that instrument as well as his solo credentials, Theo Charlier’s 36 Etudes For Trumpet, Du Style, performed on clarinet. Vaccaro also plays bass clarinet in one movement of the Clarinet Quintet and alto sax on all the sax quartet pieces; making it all seem easy. The Left Coast String Quartet - violinists Norman Hughes and Mari Haig, Julie Metz viola and Greg Adamson cello - are Vaccaro’s colleagues for Scott’s Clarinet Quintet, which opens the CD.

Melody has been John Scott’s alpha and omega throughout his career and the Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet does not stray from gospel. The narrative between soloist and strings in the first movement is charming and clear, the second movement’s slightly gimpy waltz tune characterful and fun, Vaccaro’s nice tone and easy approach on clarinet belying the tricky bits with class. Scott’s use of bass clarinet in the third movement Andante/Adagietto works well, the composer exploring color capabilities in all the instrument’s registers. The last movement of this accessible as well as challenging work presents a sassy, jazzy, tongue-in-cheek musical smile, a bit of a showcase for Vaccaro’s expertise in all matters of inflection, mood, color and style.

A little pause to cleanse the palate (the Bach solo flute Allemande) before Scott’s A Week in October for Sax Quartet. Four days in October represented by four distinct movements, as the work canters through its narrative with some beautiful and extraordinarily romantic writing, played with nice balance and tone by the Mason, Matsuura, Vaccaro and Zick Saxophone Quartet. Another solo interlude for Vaccaro follows to show off his lovely clarinet tone - Du Style from Theo Charlier’s 36 Etudes For Trumpet - before the remaining three works on the CD by saxophonist and composer Damon Zick who also performs baritone sax on the disc.

Describing three of Edward Gorey’s comic characters Hector, Desmond and Titus for Sax Quartet dabbles playfully with a funky jazz style and contagious rhythmic vitality, while Zick’s Three for Four for Sax Quartet , originally composed for the NOVUS Trombone Quartet at Rice University but in the composer’s words “found its true home” in the musky colors of the saxophone quartet is meditative and a bit melancholic, working a six-note figure through various iterations. Nada Pero Máquinas for Sax Quartet brings the CD to a nice close with playful jazz riffs for soprano sax and plenty of fun for the sax quartet as a whole.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Learn more about the 2 CD set

Visit Clipper Erickson’s website

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Pianist Clipper Erickson has devoted an enormous amount of thought, preparation time, energy, and virtuoso pianism crafting this remarkable 2 CD set (over two hours of fascinating music) comprising the complete piano works of Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943). A member of the teaching and adjunct faculties at Westminster Conservatory in Princeton and Temple University in Philadelphia, Erickson’s beautifully packaged and superbly performed compilation, My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett is offered by Navona Records (NV 6013), a PARMA Recordings company.

Exquisite sound engineering at Reitstadel, Neumarkt in Oberpfalz, Germany under the world-class recording supervision of Dirk Fischer ranks this set as arguably one of the most significant releases of neglected piano repertoire since the revelatory Nonesuch recordings in the 1970s of Scott Joplin’s piano music. Those releases thoroughly transformed performance practice regarding ragtime and other popular music of the turn of the last century. This recording of Nathaniel Dett’s piano music presents to the world for the first time, an important and essentially fresh portfolio of major piano works by a significant North American composer of African descent.

Nathaniel Dett is admired as the first American composer to incorporate Negro folk music into the European art music tradition. Born in Canada, the composer spent most of his life and career in the United States, graduating from the Oberlin Conservatory majoring in piano and composition in 1908. His education continued at Harvard with composer Arthur Foote (1920-21) and in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. He earned his Master of Music from the Eastman School of Music in 1932. Dett was a polymath; not only composer, choir leader, pianist, and teacher but recognized poet and writer. His, The Emancipation of Negro Music, won an important literary prize at Harvard in 1920 and his volume of poems, The Album of a Heart, conveys Dett’s transcendent message of human oneness – a notion revolutionary then, as now.  

Unerring prescience and stunning technical prowess are Clipper Erickson’s interpretive tools as he unravels without fuss, the subtle mysteries of the composer’s deep and often melancholic musings. The evocative titles on these two discs offer a richly rewarding and audibly discernible progression through Dett’s intellectual, moral, and musical life over four decades, from the turn of the last century to the mid 1940s. His piano suites Magnolia (1912), In the Bottoms (1913), Enchantment (1922) Cinnamon Grove (1928), Tropic Winter (1938), Eight Bible Vignettes (1941-43) and his other descriptive musical snapshots After the Cakewalk (1900), Cave of the Winds (1902), Inspiration Waltzes (1903), and Nepenthe and the Muse (1922) are masterpieces of form and structure. Dett’s passionate but private world view, which he held tightly, is discreetly channeled through Erickson’s poignant interpretations.

The most moving and prophetic work on this one-of-a-kind collection was also Dett’s last. Eight Bible Vignettes [tracks 8-15 on disc two] composed over a span of three years before the composer’s death in 1943 is a masterful example of compositional maturity, conflating virtuoso writing in the tradition of Liszt or Brahms with 20th century harmony. Erickson’s performance of each Vignette glitters with finesse and erudition. Likewise, the pianist’s approach to a much earlier suite, In the Bottoms [tracks 6-10 on disc one]. Careful stylings and cheerful panache are brought to the keyboard by Erickson for the lighter pieces After the Cakewalk and Inspiration Waltzes but even these reveal a serious and thoughtful curation of Dett’s profound musical mind that will satisfy scholars for years to come. My Cup Runneth Over: The Complete Piano Works of R. Nathaniel Dett is a must own for those who love hearing the piano captured exquisitely on disc. More importantly, this thoroughly researched set (the program notes are fabulous) is an important reference resource for pianists and programmers alike. Superlative performances all, pianist Clipper Erickson has resurrected an American master.

 Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Pacific Northwest-based Westwood Wind Quintet’s new CD titled Augmented (Crystal Records CD791) is just that, a delightful and not often heard collection of works for wind quintet and sundry additional instruments. Paul Hindemith’s Septet for Woodwind Quintet, Trumpet, and Bass Clarinet; Mládi for Woodwind Quintet and Bass Clarinet by Leos Janácek; Bruce Stark’s beautifully crafted and satisfying Americana Wind Quintet; and William Mathias’ less is more Concertino for Flute, Oboe, Bassoon, and Piano together offer a unique window on this diverse repertoire for chamber winds. Westwood Wind Quintet oboist and Crystal Records founder Peter Christ and Westwood regulars John Barcellona (flute), William Helmers (clarinet), Patricia Nelson (bassoon), and John Cox (horn) are joined for this recording by colleagues Doug Reneau (Trumpet), Carol Robe (bass clarinet), and Lisa Bergman (piano). All are first rate professionals from various ensembles and orchestras in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

California-born and educated now Seattle-based composer Bruce Stark’s Americana Wind Quintet (2009) is the takeaway discovery on this CD. A jewel, Stark’s quintet is gorgeous, engaging, complexly structured, and intellectually rewarding. Its four movements are as expansive as the American spirit, with lots of nice ensemble writing, delicious coloring, and motivic ideas cleverly linked by threads of repetition and special effect. With evocative titles like Hymn to the Dawn, River Song, and City Shuffle Stark’s quintet is chock-o-block with musical imagery evoking the vast American landscape, physical and otherwise. Stark also enjoys an exceptional understanding of the wind palette that is on splendidly salutary display throughout the work – a listening pleasure for professional musicians and lay listeners alike. The Westwood Wind Quintet turns in a thoughtful, balanced performance.    

A pantheon of subtle shades and distilled emotions, Paul Hindemith’s Septet (1948) is rich in wind color and coyness. The trumpet is given a particularly delicate and challenging chamber music role, realized with grace and gorgeous tone by Doug Reneau who has been Assistant Principal Trumpet of the Oregon Symphony since 2014. Other highlights of the Hindemith include a beautifully expressive clarinet soliloquy played with sensitivity by William Helmers in the first Intermezzo and superb ensemble playing in the complicated Variationen. Carol Lobe’s additional bass clarinet timbre is captured beautifully. Westwood’s take on Janácek’s four-movement Mládi (Youth) from 1924 features nice horn licks by John Cox, Principal with the Oregon Symphony since 1982. Congrats to Chrystal Records’ recording engineers for beautifully capturing the rich sonority of Robe’s bass clarinet here as well. A valuable addition to the collections of wind audiophiles Augmented is also an important reference CD for those looking for unique programming.  

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

Contact Harvey Thurmer to buy the CD: Thurmehp@miamioh.edu

Read Harvey Thurmer’s biography

Visit soprano Audrey Luna’s website

Watch Harvey Thurmer’s lecture recital Music in the Shadow of Stalin and read my review of the video performance

In 2003 violinist Harvey Thurmer and soprano Audrey Luna prepared and recorded Romanian-Hungarian composer György Kurtág’s esoteric masterpiece Kafka Fragmente, Opus 24 (1987) a series of 40 splintered word phrases by German Jewish novelist and short story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) set to music. Kafka Fragmente focuses on the author’s bleak world view and sheds light on his enigmatic and often troubling stream of consciousness writing. Despite its inescapably dense intellectual nature and extreme musical difficulty, Kafka Fragmente has earned the composer kudos as one of central Europe’s important contemporary minds. Opus 24 ranks among the most performed and recorded in Kurtág’s chamber music portfolio.

Audrey Luna’s vocal repertoire is broad and operatic, but her voice - clean, perfectly pitched, richly colored and elastic as the universe - affords her opportunity to successfully specialize in contemporary chamber music as well. This recording illustrates her unique capabilities and stamina, stretching vocal technique and color to virtuoso limits in achieving Kurtág’s visionary expectations. Harvey Thurmer’s spot-on sense of pitch and nuanced dynamic capability, his encyclopedic command of the violin’s host of special effects and his intuitive understanding of the composer’s intention and purpose give him ample chops on this CD to realize Kurtág’s challenging writing for the instrument and garner bragging rights as a contemporary music interpreter of unusual empathy snd strategic worth.

Divided into four sections, many of the 40 sound miniatures are less than a minute in length yet define, often eloquently, Kafka’s existential predilections about human character, not just the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. Though Kafka’s word bites are often cynical and isolating - Someone tugged at my clothes, but I shook him off, or I will dive into my story even if that should lacerate my face - there is in Kurtág’s pointillist writing for the violin and imaginative vocal soliloquy an awareness of vulnerability that penetrates the listener’s soul and speaks to our collective frailties.

Kurtág uses the fiddle as talisman, mood setter and meditative presence beneath the text shards, shifting colors and harmonic densities as the words dictate. Luna’s voice ranges comfortably over a huge tactical, technical, musical and notational terrain often fraught with hazards, which she nimbly addresses and makes part of her diverse narrative.

One fragment in particular, Sunday, 19th July 1920 sums up Kafka’s incredibly bleak verbal pointillism: Slept, woke, slept, woke, miserable life. Kurtág’s writing here is fascinating and difficult for the violin, the mantra of Kafka’s discontent intoned with luminous clarity by Luna. Kafka Fragmente isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this recording by violinist Harvey Thurmer and soprano Audrey Luna is definitive.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Revew

Paul Fried’s latest CD release the ninth in a series of flute-centric recordings over the past several years, is devoted to concerti for the instrument by Mozart including the Concerto No. 1 in G Major, K. 313; the Concerto No. 2 in D Major, K. 314; and the Concerto for Flute & Harp K. 299 with principal harp of the New West Symphony, Maria Casale. All three concerti were composed in 1778 when Mozart was in his twenties and bubbling with youthful vigor and bright optimism. 

There is no mistaking Paul Fried’s virtuoso playing in the G Major and D Major solo concerti, which are first up on the disc. His tone is clean and bright throughout, with particularly satisfying cadenzas, his own, ramping up the excitement of both works. Without doubt the highlight of the CD is the performance by Fried and harpist Maria Casale of the popular Concerto for Flute and Harp in C Major, K. 299. Casale has performed with most of the major orchestras in the region including the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra and is a powerful presence on the CD, excelling in clean technique and confident playing while also bringing sparkle and energy to the performance. Fried’s playing, as always, impeccable. Balance between flute, harp, and the Virtuosi is excellent, though the orchestra at times sounds a little distant. In all, a charming and lighthearted recording of Mozart masterpieces. The disk can be purchased at the artist’s web site,

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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Visit Mike Vaccaro’s website

Watch my interview with composer John Scott and Mike Vaccaro about Scott’s chamber music portfolio

Watch my interview with Mike Vaccaro and read my review of his Journeyman CD

Almost Alone - Milestone and Metaphor

Woodwind master in the Hollywood film and television world for decades; creator of his own line of clarinet and saxophone mouthpieces; champion of the many composers he has met on Hollywood sound stages, Mike Vaccaro exudes the calm of his retirement years. Still, there’s a certain no-nonsense self discipline in his mantra, a casual insouciance that is neither indifferent nor condescending - focused.

full review soon

Visit Luke Spence’s website

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Watch my video chat with Dr. Spence, and enjoy watching video performances of five works from the Translations CD he performed at his DMA recital.

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Visit Rain Worthington’s website

Read my review of Rain Worthington’s Dream Vapors CD

Review soon

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Read this article about WordSong's co-founder, composer Tom Schnauber

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review coming soon

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Read Derek Jones’ page at MOVE Records

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